


diamond child

by klickitats



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: A Big Ol' Dragon, Bull's a Mage, M/M, Teaching, The Hissing Wastes, ancient ruins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-07
Updated: 2016-09-07
Packaged: 2018-08-13 18:25:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 41,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7981603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klickitats/pseuds/klickitats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While exploring the ass-end of the Hissing Wastes, the Inquisition runs headlong into the maw of Thedas’ strangest high dragon. Bull takes a bad hit to save the Inquisitor and Dorian from certain death, but nobody’s the worse for wear. That is, until Bull wakes up the next morning and coughs up a pile of raw diamonds.</p><p>There’s only one explanation. The Iron Bull’s a mage. And like all mages, he needs teaching.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the golden dragon

**Author's Note:**

> Please check out these  beautiful portraits by keladri  made especially for this fic! 
> 
> Shout-out to sunspeared for her eternal beta guidance, and never-ending exclamation marks.

Ten days into the Hissing Wastes. Couldn’t mark the date, just—ten days from when they set foot into the bluffs and the nothing. Anything before that he couldn’t recall, mostly lumbering around, bored stiff, listening to Malika prattle on about the ruins she wanted to find, come void or high water. They’d happened a couple already—both ransacked and left empty by the Venatori. She made notes anyway. Filled up a journal near every three days with notes for Dagna. Mostly sketches and long, rambling paragraphs in a hand so scrawled and messy Bull thought at first she was writing with a cipher. 

“What,” Dorian asked, as they stopped yet again under another spindly tree, cracked and dry in the desert heat, and no water for miles, “on earth could you possibly be writing her? Sonnets?” 

Vivienne craned just slightly to look over Malika’s shoulder—she looked untouched by the heat, her high lace collar made of some kind of impressively breathable material she’d commissioned since joining the Inquisition. _I asked them to weave me a coat of water,_ she told Bull, a hint of a smile on her lips. _They nearly succeeded. Next time they won’t disappoint._ She offered to let him touch it. He declined. Not the kind of thing he tended to brush up against on purpose. 

“A lovely drawing, my dear,” she said. “You’ve really breathed spirit into the crumbling leaves.” 

Malika beamed. “Don’t act sweet on me.” 

“ _The sand is wide_ ,” Dorian began, to absolutely no one. “ _A filthy tide of shit and grit spread far and high.”_

Malika was an archaeologist born in Orzammar’s bowels, a miner’s kid who traded her skill in appraising gems and gold to the Carta for a way out of that life. She and Dagna magnetized to each other on sight, the only two members of a foreign country no one could visit. Not that Bull harbored any desire to shove his head underneath the earth and see the hidden cities there. 

What Malika valued, even higher than peace, was documentation. All the old things of the world had gone too long alone. She wasn’t one to let the dead lie. And as Inquisitor, the entirety of Thedas spread itself for her, a rich tapestry of stones to be turned over. Josephine devised a thousand reasons she could pull out at any given moment—heritage, or nationalism, or preservation—to convince a noble to let her go digging around on their lands. And the Wastes—they were the Wastes. Nobody owned them. The only part of Orlais that was just itself, scars and all. No masquerade required. 

Malika, recently returned triumphant from the Winter Palace, declared herself in need of a feast. The trip was planned, and off they went. Vivienne and Dorian worked hand-in-hand, somewhat out of necessity. Malika couldn’t stand Solas. He insisted on sticking around, painting his rotunda at all hours, skulking in the dark like a dog. Intruded on her polite nature. Malika never kicked anybody out, but not really out of softness. She viewed them all like the little silver tools in her leather case. The little brushes, the charcoals, the picks and scalpels. She’d find a use for him one day. 

They were supposed to be killing ‘Vints, too. That’s why Dorian was along. The scholarly pursuit, sure, but Bull knew Dorian wanted to cut his teeth on some Venatori. Maybe prove to the Inquisition he was one of a kind. Not like the other defectors. The right kind of rebel. He jumped on at just the last minute, after Red warned Malika about possible crossover in the far reaches of the desert. Just enough activity to make it worthwhile. Varric was all too happy to give up his place on the caravan to the desert wasteland, and Malika liked the idea of studying the Venatori. Bull didn’t like the idea of studying a thing after it died, but that was her business. 

And him. Bull was only her second favorite muscle—Blackwall was too surly for her tastes and Cassandra was cleaning out Therinfal Redoubt by herself to save the Inquisition a few sovereigns. But his middling status wasn’t to be confused with mediocrity. Bull would serve, and well. 

The sun beat down on them. Vivienne fashioned them canopied tents in the airy Rivaini style at night, spent an hour putting down wards around the camp so they could sleep with the breeze against their backs. Ten days in, and they’d found a couple puddles of water, lazurite by the pound, a legion of half-choked trees, and rocky bluffs out the ass. 

“A real treasure, Boss,” he said. 

“Hush.” Her pen made a thick, dark swoop across the paper. She finished whatever she drew, then turned to Vivienne. “Your smallest knife, if I might?” 

Dorian said, “Inquisitor, the tree is dead.” 

“Come off it,” she scolded. “Your sense of curiosity needs exercise.” 

“Oh, please,” he muttered. 

Bull raised his eyebrow. “What? This not your idea of a good time?”

Dorian rolled his eyes. Bull thought only the cold and wet brought out his bad moods, but the Wastes were no different. All day, he snapped and paraded his impatience. Part of Bull wanted to say, _no different than any other slog_ , but. Dorian pulled his weight. Bull liked the heat of the sun—even when it drained him it gave him a new type of energy. He’d rather sweat his balls off than have to dig foxholes in the snow. Dorian was the same, Bull could tell. They marched miles and miles and he never said a word, even took the lead when Malika needed to slow her pace a little. 

“I suppose under the Qun you’re never allowed the chance to prod at flora and fauna,” Dorian told him. “Revel away, Iron Bull.”

The temptation to argue with Dorian existed in omnipresence, and never waned. It only cycled through different forms, much like the moon towering above their heads when night covered the desert. Bull snorted. “We’ve got orchards in Par Vollen,” he said. “My tama grew squash as big as my head. What did you think we ate?” 

Dorian only arched an eyebrow, watching Malika look for a place to press the blade of her knife. 

“Oh shit,” Bull said. He tilted his head to mark the path of the sun. It was past noon. “Don’t tell me you thought we ate grass.” 

“Maker knows you all probably eat everything in sight,” was Dorian’s response. “Don’t see how else you maintain your girlish figures.” 

Bull snorted, a genuine chortle from the gut. Dorian swiped some sweat from his brow, flicked it into the dirt. Vivienne delivered the knife into Malika’s hand, and Malika made a careful incision. 

The air shuddered. Both Vivienne and Dorian rocked a little before going steady. Vivienne narrowed her eyes. “Inquisitor,” she began, but Malika was too keen on the prize. She dragged a long, sharp line along the bark, which parted beneath the blade like rotted flesh. Beneath—instead of dead, or green wick, or even thick brown tree skin, there was--

“Gold,” breathed Malika. It gleamed brightly in the sun. 

She pulled away the burned crackling. No tree left to speak of. Just a long, slender tusk, arching towards the sun. The wind brushed by. It wobbled back and forth, caught in the breeze. 

“Inquisitor,” said Vivienne again in a voice she rarely used—hard as stone to crush the worry beneath it, but it was too late. The sand rumbled, churned beneath them, like the desert wanted to gargle them in its dry throat. Bull pulled Malika away from the tree without asking and hefted her over his shoulder. They scrambled up a dune. 

“You felt it?” muttered Dorian, and she nodded once, curt. Sweat beaded on her brow. And then the tusk straightened, a huff of air pushing the sand away. And then an enormous sound, tons of muscle straining up, displacing a curtain of dust. It rippled, for at least two hundred feet—almost like a whirlpool. Quick sand, gearing up for its own hunger. 

“We gotta go,” Bull said, taking a step back. But he was the only one. Malika grinned like a demon; Vivienne and Dorian stayed rooted to the spot, mouths open, gazing upon whatever behemoth was waking up from its nap. This was the fucking problem with mages, with archaeologists, with everyone—they had to gawk at everything new, like they were the first people to ever see a damn grain of sand. Stupid. Stupid. 

He moved to grab Malika and throw her over his shoulder but then, with all the irony the desert could hold, a massive head reared up through the sand, its long, serpentine neck stretching with all the crack and kinks of a hundred thousand years. Pushed up on strong, thick forelegs. Arched over them, peering. 

A dragon, gold as Josephine’s satin underthings, stared down at them, sand pouring from its nostrils. 

Malika had strict rules, which Bull followed dutifully. He and the Qun split a whole year before, a scar he carried but forgot was there on good days. Like his eye, like his leg, like his hand. He would accumulate broken pieces until he caught one too many. The Qun went deeper than a bum ankle, but--no point in dwelling on it. 

But: the rules. Her rules reminded him of the stricture, made him fond of her nature. Order: important. Roles: important. The tools in the case, the tools at her disposal, the gears winding around her every moment of every day. Varric told him once she was an artificer, the kind of fighter who crafted each battle with an inventor’s hands to her innovative whimsy. He had seen her set traps and demolish an entire squad of Red Templars with the snip of a single thread. He didn’t doubt her mind. But her rules would not bend: 

_Take nothing from small folks’ houses._

_Only kill beasts for game._

_No swindling._

_No snobs._

And the worst one: 

_All dragons must live._

Ancient, dusty, scary as fuck—everything she loved. They spent an awful lot of time around their territory, and Bull bet his last sovereign she was looking for eggs. Wanted to raise one, probably. (Damn him, he’d help her, if she ever snagged one from the nest. Skyhold was big enough.) 

It opened its mouth, and its roar was a creaky ache of a sound. Raspy with age. Sand crusted its eyebrows. Long whiskers protruded from its narrow snout, and thick fringe covered its maw and neck. 

“Does it have a fucking _beard_?” muttered Bull, grinning wide enough to split his own face. Glee overtook any last vestige of panic under his skin. 

“Oh,” Malika said, “oh, we need to go _now_.” 

“Go where?” Dorian hissed under his breath. “No real cover, far as the eye can see, because you wanted to vacation somewhere ‘without horizons.’”

Malika’s nostrils flared wide as the dragon’s. “Not a vacation,” she muttered back. “Expedition. An expedition.” 

Bull drew his axe from his back, careful not to glint the sun in the steel. “We got this, Boss,” he said. “Let us handle it.” 

Malika made a small, distressed noise. “No,” she pleaded. “No, no.” 

“Maker in his city.” Dorian raked his hands through his hair, easily, having sweated out his pomade since noon. “This isn’t catch and release.” 

“Mmhmm,” Bull said. “Not really a ‘Vint thing.” 

Dorian opened his mouth, eyes flashing. But Vivienne beat him to it. “Be silent,” she snapped under her breath, and he held. But then the dragon blinked, once, twice, before baring all its teeth. 

“Fuck,” said Bull. And then it roared again, this time with all the breath in its lungs. And then it took to the sky, a winding spiral of gold. Its mouth dropped open, and from deep within its belly, a torrent of liquid fire spilled out. A waterfall. It pooled in the sand and stunk like burned flesh. And then it hardened into rugged spikes, rough and sharp and ready to impale flesh at the first opportunity.

The battle blurred, after that. All of them did now. Bull’s memory around fighting got foggy in his old age. (He wasn’t that old. Old for a Hissrad, maybe. Too much time with the tamassrans.) Fighting cracked him open in a way that proved problematic under the Qun—both his re-educations had come about because of who he was fighting, or why. The result had been trying to make it harder and harder to put things together after he picked up his axe. Not so much he couldn’t, but just enough that he couldn’t quite press his thumb down on certainty. But when Bull would try to piece it all together later, he’d come away with a few details: 

Vivienne, glorious. Crafting wide arcs of violet-and-white lightning, crashing over the beast like the hand of a god. It made all the hairs on the back of his neck stand up when she summoned the spells, the electricity spanning out from her open hands, staff tossed to the ground beside her. Raw enough she didn’t have time to channel it. Bull admired audacity against the wild, and nothing was more so then trying to clamp a dragon, ancient and writhing, in a cage made by her hands. It had worked for a time before the lightning shriveled away and Vivienne took her staff and spirit blade in hand to make butcher’s meat of chaos, but Bull would never forget. 

Dorian, strangely—mediocre. Like Vivienne, Dorian touched all types of magic. Unlike Vivienne, he preferred fire over the others, and it seemed to ripple away as soon as it met the dragon’s scales, no more effective than steam. At his first blustering wind of fire, the dragon’s gold skin rippled, and a thick coat of rocky, grey scales engulfed its forelegs and breast, and nothing he threw at it could penetrate. He focused instead on the draining of its life-force, an act that Bull could feel in his teeth no matter how far away he was. It activated his gag reflex, made bile rise in his throat. Couldn’t ever figure out why, but it happened. In time, he summoned shapes of the undead, gangly-limbed and humanoid, for the all-important task of protecting their Inquisitor, since she had lost all heart for the fight itself. 

Malika, completely useless. Everybody froze in battle at some point—Bull couldn’t hold it against her with a beast this big gaping down at them. They’d fought worse, of course. Bull had heard tales of The Nightmare in the Fade at Adamant Fortress, and the rifts grew more sizable each time they ran into one. But Malika had not prepared to fight a beast she had so desperately wanted to preserve, and each crossbow bolt she fired seemed just a few inches off its target. As though her hesitation became its own ghost, and gently guided her hands to miss, and miss, and miss. 

Self-preservation, he figured. That was alright. They could make it without her this time. 

Vivienne’s blade did the work of crippling the dragon’s ankles; cutting through its hardened skin. Bull, axe singing tenor as he swung and swung, landed a swift blow to the hinge of its jaw when it dropped its head in pain. The crack made its mouth hang open, unable to close, and Bull shouted his victory with a string of clumsy Qunlat into the echoes of the desert. The dragon roared, beating the sand with its forelegs, destroying the dune where Malika kept her post. 

She and Dorian tumbled down straight into its path, sand flying everywhere. Dorian flung up a barrier, and the dragon beat its open head against it, liquid fire splashing every which way and hardening into its jagged shell. Bull held his axe fast and ran. Vivienne cast a streak of lightning around its ankle, tightening until he heard the unmistakable sound of breaking bone. 

The dragon pulled back its head and roared, fire cascading over its razor lips. It exposed the throat, a patch devoid of the armored scales. He saw Dorian narrow his gaze, and raise his arm, even as the dragon snarled and started forward. 

Too close. They were both too close. Dorian didn’t see the thick spill of all that quicksilver flooding over the teeth. Too busy pinning it right in the throat with that bolt of fire, like the long finger of a god. “Above you!” snarled Bull, but his voice was lost in the wind. Vivienne pulled on her chain of lightning with all her might, but it shattered against the dragon’s strength, the death rattle of its last movements. 

The quicksilver pitched, running over the edge of the dragon’s lips. Bull did what he did. He moved like the crack of a whip, and took the blow on his own back. 

~~~ 

He woke up shivering, sky gone dark. 

Dorian, a little ruffled, but otherwise unharmed, cast him a sideways look. Then he turned to Vivienne. “He’s awake,” he said. “Go on, if you want.” 

Vivienne was on her feet in an instant. “You’ll be fine on your own?”

“I’ll send up yellow fire if we’re ambushed,” Dorian replied dryly. “But I imagine I can dig a foxhole under the Bull just as well.” 

Vivienne did not acknowledge the jest or even let it roll off her; Bull could feel the cold shoulder ten feet away. She gathered her staff and pulled that lithe, blue-gray coat around her frame, and set off into the night. 

Long pause. Bull pushed up on his elbows, wobbled up to sit. Dizzy as a struck bell. 

“Where...” he began, then had to take a breath. 

“Malika was upset about the dragon,” Dorian said. He was mending a piece of his leather armor. Not in his skillset when he first showed up at Haven’s door. But there were no tailors to his liking on this side of the world, and two years made a world of difference in his hands. Bull watched the careful stitching. People could feel, sometimes, if you were watching them. Dorian either knew and hid it well, or was used to the eyes of others peering at other movements, small and graceful as the hands might be. Each careful stitch honed reality into sharper focus, a rhythm to set his breath in time. 

Fuck. He pressed the heels of his hands into his brow. “So she ran off?” 

“Not too far.” Dorian doesn’t look up. 

He squinted. Both of them were low on mana—the fire glowed low, with none of the little violet and white lights Vivienne liked to conjure when their party camped alone and in the dark. “Where’s the--” 

Dorian nodded, glancing over Bull’s shoulder. With an aching pang and a rock on his hip, he turned. And there laid the dragon carcass, twisted and broken under the moonlight. Malika dragged him to Val Royeaux once for some errand—Bull spent a lot of time that trip wandering up and down the entrance to the bazaar, looking at the marble statues, pieces missing and shattered by time. He didn’t find them beautiful. They were just stone. 

But the dragon, despite the blood polling beneath its gold and platinum scales, merely slept. Even with the scales and flesh stripped away, the bones separated and chipped into use, the skull hanging from some nobleman’s ceiling—it looked like it was only a moment from snapping its jaws and roaring to life. 

Bull gave a deep sigh, a contentment rumbling from the core of his belly. 

“Well,” Dorian said, “there’s no accounting for taste.” 

Bull took another moment to savor the look of it and all it was: victory and that slip of heartbreak he knew plagued Qunari with every beast broken at their axes. They were all rocks, longing to be broken by that final surge of the sea’s tide. And every time a wave approached, they met it with open hands. When it receded, too weak to cleave them in two, they mourned. This would always be true, no matter how long he was Tal-Vashoth. 

“You don’t find it—I don’t know, kinda moving?” Bull heard himself say. 

“It’s a beast,” Dorian said flatly. “A beast that tried its damndest to murder us all in a stinking desert.” 

“You spooked?” 

Dorian’s eyebrows raised a little, and he began a new row of stitches. Bull watched the dip of his fingers, the tense of his arm as he pulled the thread taut through the leather. “Because I’m not drooling over a carcass? No.” He glanced again over Bull’s shoulder. “Go on, though.” 

Bull only cocked its head. 

“Your kill,” said Dorian with remarkable levity. “Roll around in its guts to mark your scent, or whatever it is Qunari do after a grand battle. Drink the blood. Hang its scales from your belt.”

“Cute,” Bull said. “And new, for you. You always like this after you feel good about killing something big and old? You need to go off and weep with Malika?” 

Dorian straightened then, like an elbow pressed to the curve of his spine. “No. But I don’t celebrate—I don’t feel good about killing,” he said. 

“Didn’t think so.” Bull rubbed his wrists. It was sore, but not broken. “Just about winning.” 

“I’m relieved,” Dorian replied, “we weren’t murdered by her curiosity.”

Bull didn’t say anything; he flopped back down into the sand, pillowed his arms under his head. The moon hung bright and fat above them. Even in the mountains, high and alone, it was never so clear. Bull didn’t give a rat’s ass for gods, but the universe peered closer at them here. He knew when he was being watched. Whatever that meant. Whatever that was. 

“Good for you,” Bull said, and Dorian said nothing more. The scales on the belt wasn’t a shit idea, though. In the morning, he’d convince Malika to think of the dragon corpse as another ruin for her to scout, full of brilliant treasures for their soldiers to lug back to Dagna. Sera, too, loved tales of the dragons they watched from high cliffs when she returned. Loved long and winding tales of great beasts, felled under Cassandra’s sword and burned to a crisp by Dorian’s fire. It’d smooth. He had nothing to worry about. 

He yawned, but the clear breath he swallowed into his lungs made him feel drunk. Tiredness tugged at his eyelids—the strain of the day, he figured, and nothing more. But now that it had decided to claim him, sleep flooded over his mind like a blanket. Nothing gentle about it. Just swift. Dorian said something—he wasn’t sure what, and it didn’t matter. 

~~~

Bull dreamed of snow. Nights on the Wastes weren’t cold, not like on Seheron, just cool enough to sleep. But Bull’s bones shook with bitterness. Chattered, like teeth. The sound branched from memory to memory, a spider unable to stop spinning its web: teeth in the cold, jaws rattling in fear, fingers unable to still. The sound of skeletons, picked clean by crows, clacking against each other in the wind. 

The cold bit deeper than snow or ice—he endured it in the east of Orlais when necessary, but only then. But that was weather. This was being curled up inside a crypt two miles below the surface of the earth, curled inside an empty skullcap. A cold so hard it had yet to be discovered. No wind, no rain—immovable. A solid force. The heart of a storm, balled up between strong hands. 

It twisted him up. He realized, somehow, the trap didn’t hold him—he held the trap. It burrowed up from his stomach. Alive. Peering at the inside of his wide gut, tapping on his ribs to test their sturdiness. The touch played him. Then, with a sudden breath, it tried to make its escape. Rushed up his lungs, through his throat, a flood of cold that turned his molars to stone, froze his jaw shut on his tongue. 

It was the bright, white light of panic that saved him. Instinct, the unbearable need to survive. He wrenched himself out of it. His eye burst open and he threw himself onto his side, coughing his own lungs out. That hard, bitter cold cracked his esophagus, froze it like living ice. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe. Tears ran out of the corner of his eyes until they went solid on his face, and he tilted back onto his knees, face pointing towards the sun. Air sucked in through his throat in a tiny crack, but no more, not enough. 

A pair of hands on his shoulders—and they hurt, fingers made of molten metal, but the touch was nothing compared to this ache rattling through his throat. 

Something shook loose within him, sharp and bitter and falling, falling---

Bull leaned over and threw up diamonds, handfuls of diamonds, into the sand.

He collapsed his weight onto his hands and knees, wheezing. The hole in his throat grew a little wider. The warm hands left his shoulders. Silence surrounded him. 

“Well,” said Malika, “I’ve never seen that before.” 

Vivienne tipped up his chin. Her fingers smelled like water. Whose hands were at his back? “Iron Bull,” she said calmly, “can you open your mouth for me?” 

The words almost made Bull snort, despite how green-piss scared he was. He did it without another word, but as his jaw opened he felt that _pop, pop, pop_ in his throat, rock cracking loose, and then he was down, face six inches from the sand, and retching gems. 

Warm hands, again, in the dip of his shoulders. A set of small brown fingers darted in and out of his visage, snatching a few from the pile. 

“Inquisitor,” snapped Dorian. “Some space.” 

“Sorry,” she said, “it’s just--” 

He didn’t hear any more on the recoil of his gag reflex. They rattled out of him, ears filled with a crystalline landslide, tuneless and needle-sharp. His spine tightened on the next brace, Dorian said, “Breathe, Bull,” and Vivienne muttered, “He can’t, there’s too many--” 

And then no more sounds. Just the rattle of the diamonds, blocking out everything else, and the press of his own lungs trying to find succor. Nothing. It had frozen too tight. 

“Do something,” Dorian said. 

“The magic could react poorly,” Vivienne answered. Her palm went flat against his throat, the sudden cool almost too prickly to bear. “We don’t know what this is.” 

“Then either way he’s dead.” That was Malika. He pictured her, hands on her hips, examining a piece of malfunctioning machinery. A millstone that wouldn’t grind, a waterwheel stuck on a stone. “Do it.” 

The press of her cold palm left his throat. For a moment he floated blind in a drowning man’s panic. The edges of his vision blurred, went grey. _Fuck_ , he thought, and the flat, polished angle of a diamond scored his tongue on the way out. He tried to inhale and nothing happened—his chest was a useless set of bellows. 

Then—warmth, a glorious slide of heat as those hands moved to cup each side of his thick neck. Not the dry heat of the desert, sucking the life out of every inch it touched. Familiar. Not the aching soreness of skin too close to the fire. Just warmth. It didn’t hurt. 

The stalagmites in his lungs dripped away, the diamonds slithered into his gut on snow-melt. He took a breath, free and clear, and the desert air tasted like fine wine. 

The hands didn’t drop away—and then he began to realize what it was, magic, mana rubbing up against him and getting comfortable, and all his skin went taut with gooseflesh. He tried to bite out a word— _enough—_ but it didn’t make it. He scrabbled at his chest, his shoulders, until his fingers pried the hands off and he nearly rolled onto his side in his attempt to get away. 

He turned his head. There was Malika, hands on hips. Vivienne on her knees, hands in her lap, eyes peering at him with a wideness she didn’t usually deign to show. And Dorian on his ass, toppled back from the push. 

In the center, a sizable pile of diamonds. They were raw, cold and molten, gleaming only from the inside. 

No one said anything. He coughed, once. Everyone jumped in their skins a little. But nothing dropped out of his lips. He was shaking. One of his hands balled into a fist to halt it. 

“Man,” Bull said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “what do you think my shit looks like?”

~~~

Malika, never one to shy away from her pursuit of an answer, whirled on Dorian and Vivienne with the velocity of a sand-spout. “What the fuck was that?” she demanded. She never swore, and the word sounded like it cut the inside of her cheek as she spat it out. 

Bull rubbed his thumb at the bob of his throat. Every breath made him sore—like breathing in too cold air. The desert grated against him now. He stared at the stones in their clumsy mound. _You did that_. The thought echoed through the numb fog holding his brain in a vice, and then twisted into points, fangs in a viper’s mouth— _you_ , it snarled. _You. Making something out of nothing. You know what that is. It’s saare--_

The thought snapped in half, a tree branch over his knee. No. He pressed his hand against his flesh to stop it from shaking. The ability to think of more than one thing at a time had completely left him. Shock, he thought blankly, and felt all his insides curl into too-tight stitches. 

“How are we supposed to know?” said Dorian, voice thready with exasperation, adrenaline. Trying to find his feet after the crisis—after Bull. He ran a hand through his hair. He kept glancing at Bull, his gaze darting to and fro like an anxious gnat, never leaving him for more than a moment. Vivienne raised her hand and laid it on his arm. It held all the weight of a spoken command—stop staring. 

Bile washed up Bull’s throat, a sting so sharp his eyes threatened to well over. He swallowed, and swallowed, remembering the press of the gems on his windpipe, every inch of his nerves still on edge, and the familiar touch of panic began prickling at his ribs. 

Malika pointed at the rocks in the sand. “You know what those are?” Silence. She spat on the ground and crossed her little arms. “Great. Of course not.” 

“Inquisitor,” said Vivienne, as even-tempered as he’d ever seen her. Her turn, to keep her periphery trained on Bull. Vivienne was sly but she wasn’t a spy—he knew she watched him just as steadily as she looked at Malika. Calm for his sake. 

“Was that magic?” Malika asked, blunt as a gut punch. “Is he a—is he a mage now?” 

She tripped over the words, a graceless reveal. But you couldn’t pull back the truth once someone spoke it out loud. 

The word made all Bull’s nerves light up like dry kindling. He was on his feet, suddenly, groping for an axe that was ten feet away in the sand. He lurched, off balance even on solid ground. Vivienne took a step forward, fingers outstretched as though reaching for piano keys, and not—not to steady him. 

He had guzzled down a half bottle of Grim’s favorite brandy after listening to all the tales of Adamant, wandered up to her balcony, and sat on the floor at her feet. Too big for any of her pretty chairs, upholstered with velvet and gold buttons. _You gotta tell me_ , he asked. She looked at him like a child begging for the bedtime story sure to give him nightmares. He’d put his big hand on her foot, impeccably wrapped in a butter-soft leather boot. _I want to know_ , he told her, _so I know how to fight ‘em, when they come for me._

He’d phrased it as an inevitable—maybe that’s what persuaded her to tell him. But she told him of what it felt like to fall endlessly into the Fade, to watch mountains fall into themselves until they spread over the land like a sea. To hear voices whispering at the shell of her ears. The Nightmare’s ugly mug, thousand-eyed and legs like a nest of hair. That was all—standard. Another whore-mouth monster for him to dig his axe into. No big deal. 

But. Vivienne had rested her chin on her hand, considering a shadow in the corner. It was nothing, she said, compared to the pull. _The pull._ Demons, rattling at the door. Knowing there was a mind to eat, a body to ride. The constant reminder. The way they scratched at every gap. Vivienne never spoke of it with fear—it was what made Bull’s stomach quiver most. She spoke of it like maids spoke of setting tables. Inevitable. This was the way it always was, how the places were always made. _Always on guard, my dear. Never let them open you up._

All Bull dreamed of was doors, after. His nails, pulling up on hinges. His eyepatch, swinging wide. His mouth, a tunnel to his heart. Torn open, slid through. As though there was no defense against it—no wall wide enough, no shield hard enough—other than hoping you weren’t too tired when they came knocking at your brain. 

Bull was no stranger to vigilance. But the thought they didn’t even need a key to open you up—every night, the Fade opened, and every night, it had to begin again—and then they were _in it_ , knee-deep in it, and looking straight into the demons that wanted to make gloves out of them—and none of it made any fucking sense. 

He looked at his hands. Thresholds to an empty house. Ready to be ransacked, spoiled, and taken. 

Vivienne said, “Bull,” and tilted her head, just so. 

Malika’s head snapped towards Dorian. “You think he’s safe to move?” she asked. 

Dorian opened and closed his mouth, but Vivienne spoke first. “Bull,” she said again. “Are you still with us?” 

The words curdled his stomach. _Safe to move_. A barrel of gaatlok shuffled onwards. He unhinged his jaw. _Talk_ , he told himself. _You can do that._

“Yeah,” he answered, after a long pause. The syllable creaked on its way out of his mouth. “I can walk.” 

“Then let’s move.” Malika gave a firm nod. “Ruins two miles to the south. I want out of here, and quick.” 

Vivienne opened her mouth to protest, but Malika held up a hand. He marveled at her in moments like this, despite whatever roiled in his chest—no matter how diminutive and scholarly she seemed, she was command through and through. “We find a place to hole up for a while,” she said. “And then we figure this out.” On _this_ , she gestured to Bull dramatically with a flip of her wrist, and cached every diamond in her knapsack. 

Nobody spoke any disagreement aloud. Bull found himself a few feet away, leaning over to pull his axe from the sand. He bent and swiped it off the ground. His arm trembled when he did it; he slung it on his back hard enough to bruise. 

He moved to bring up the rear, just as he always did. Malika in front, followed by Vivienne—they talked frequently, Malika always needing her opinion on some find or another. Then Dorian, and Bull at the back. It made the most sense. He could keep an eye on everything. 

But Vivienne appeared at his side, a wary look in her eyes. In this, at least, she wouldn’t spare him. “I’ll follow you, my dear.” She raised her arm as though allowing him the first steps through a wide palace door. He stared beyond it. 

Couldn’t be trusted to bring up the rear. “You want my axe, too?” he asked roughly, voice scraping out of his mouth. Out of the corner of his eye, Dorian stilled. “Take it.” She shook her head once. Made sense. He’d watched Vivienne work. He’d be gone long before the axe could do any damage if it was necessary. 

Bull looked up. The sky was clear. The same sky he’d be under an hour before. The sand was the same, piled under his feet. But here he was, led between two mages like a thief being walked to the gallows. Malika gave them the signal and they started off south. 

Once, he parsed through each emotion he had under the Qun. They’d worked them out of him one by one. Under the tamassrans, they worked alchemy. You mastered emotions by turning them into tools, into goals. 

Anxiety became anticipation. Despair, resignation. Joy, focus. Precise equations to be calculated under the skin, the work of mind and heart to push the body towards what it needed to do. Erase the rest. Nobody needed extremes to live. So: anger, righteousness. Mourning, justice. And confusion. Confusion. 

Confusion became emptiness. Space to hold the future. 

He had never mastered that one. All the others he could recount and hold as though they were tattooed in invisible ink along the tendons of his inner arms. He only had to glance inside himself to remember. Didn’t matter how long ago he split from the Qun. It wasn’t something he forgot. But what didn’t stick, never stuck. 

Instead, it all dissolved. He focused on the back of Dorian’s head, where damp sweat beaded at the nape of his neck. It kept him moving forward. Bull’d been spooked before—no use pretending it wasn’t true—and he knew how to deal with it. Breathe right. Take it easy. Find the solid shit around you: the sun, sweating your balls off. The sand, gritting in your boots. 

It didn’t work. Invisible fingers closed around his windpipe. _Saarebas_ , clucked a voice in the back of his head. Sounded like his tama, but he couldn’t remember the last time he heard her voice. _Surprises, always._

He spoke, then, to remember to breathe, to drive the voice from his head, to find something more solid than the sky or the ground below—because nothing was, not anymore. “Listen to Vivienne, next time,” Bull muttered, unable to keep his tongue still in his mouth. 

The memory erupted in his brain. It had only happened an hour or two ago; he could remember every detail. The choking panic of his suffocation. Vivienne’s warning voice. Malika’s decision. The warm feeling of those hands had turned to oil, slick and impossible to shake off his skin. It had touched him. It had touched him and he’d let it. Worse, it had saved him. 

“I’m sorry?” Dorian’s head turned. The kohl under his eye was as bold as it was this morning when he painted it on. Magic, perhaps, or just stronger than the pomade. 

He repeated, trying a little louder, “She was right. No magic.” 

“What on earth do you mean? She’s the one who can heal,” he replied. “I did as she directed.” 

“You used it on me,” Bull said. 

Dorian snorted. “Of course--”

“Without asking.” Even at the raspy volume, the hardness of his voice was enough to make Dorian shut it. “You didn’t ask.” 

He glanced over his shoulder again, nose wrinkled. “We couldn’t. You were dying.” He shrugged and turned back to the front. 

“I wasn’t,” Bull said. 

“Wonderful to know. Next time we’ll let you choke. Are you happy?” Dorian never had much patience for anything, and certainly not Bull. 

“Fine by me,” Bull said. 

He expected that to be the end, but Dorian fluttered a little with misdirected energy. Ruffled his own feathers. “The Inquisitor,” he continued, pointing to the front of the line, “ordered it.” 

“She didn’t make you cast.” Bull folded his arms. “You chose.” 

 

“Please.” He can hear Dorian rolling his eyes. “You’re one to lecture about following orders.” 

Bull’s nostrils flared. “Yeah, and that means what, exactly?” 

“Whatever your half-drowned brain wants.” Dorian’s spine straightened. His posture was always perfect—Bull slouched as a habit in the south. But Dorian walked like his shoulders were carved from gold. “A year of freedom under your belt,” he continued, “and you already think you can lecture me on free will.” 

Bull’s mind, whip-sharp with pain, landed on distinct memories of reports he’d looked at over Red’s shoulder. In the first days of the Inquisition’s residency at Skyhold, she’d invited him with open arms into her rookery, carefully planting letters across her desk for him to glance at. Only a choice tidbit here or there was ever worth mentioning. It was a power play. Mostly, he complimented the knives mounted on the wall, asked about where she found such good couriers. He liked their conversation.

One of the letters—a tidbit offered that he’d never take, because it didn’t matter, was one about Redcliffe’s Inn after the liberation of the mages, sometime between Adamant and their shit-kicking through Halamshiral. Dorian and Malika, a secret meeting at a secret inn, and nothing more. 

It was a situation where the blank of the page told all the story he needed. Heard Mother Giselle wiling about something to one of her aides as they walked to dinner. _Children_ , she said, _ought to respect their parents. A poor father, separated from his son._

Aloud, Bull said, “You’ve got ten minutes on me. Guess I should follow your example.” 

He didn’t know precisely what happened, but he figured it hurt enough to buckle him like a belly blow. Bull could spot when things turned, and the stifled, vague report reeked of tension. Of whatever Malika knew was too private to immortalize on paper. 

It was no use. Dorian merely tilted his chin up towards the sun, and said nothing. Bull stared at silhouette of his jaw. Defiance. A pure and simple show of its mastery. 

The silence fell harder than any blow could. And then Bull was left with only his thoughts, rolling and rolling over each other, hungry eels with nothing better to gnaw on, as they marched. 

~~~

The ruins were like the rest of the Wastes—unobtrusive. Malika sucked in air through her teeth when she saw them and made them do double time; Bull thought it looked like half a shack stuck out of a sand dune. Made of stone, sure, but little. He knew from experience they opened up into wide networks below the desert, but it didn’t stop him from feeling unimpressed. 

The stone-carved heads of paragons and their dwarven attendants poked up from beneath the sand, soldiers standing sentinel with axes at their sides. Years of battering wind had piled the sand around it like a cocoon. It sat just high enough for Vivienne to string the canvas of their canopy from its steeple into a wide berth for shade. They’d be here for a week at least, they could make themselves comfortable. 

Bull tried to help; he usually held up the side as she tied her knots, but Vivienne took one long at him and made him sit. Dorian helped instead, and Bull found himself watching grains of sand topple over each other in the wind. 

After they were finished, Dorian climbed gracefully onto the arched roof, standing with his hand at his brow. He examined all four cardinal directions, and cast a wisp of crimson light in his hand. Whatever the light held disappointed him; he crumbled it in his fist and it faded into smoke. 

“Inquisitor,” he began with a peculiar tone, but Malika served him a hard look from the sand below. He sighed. 

“Ruins,” she said. “Just for a few more days. The Venatori will wait, Dorian.” 

“They won’t,” came the ever-dry reply. “They’re Venatori. They breathe and shit and _plan._ And, if you recall, find raiding these ruins a fascinating prospect.” 

He didn’t see the look Malika gave him, but the silence was cold as bone. Dorian said nothing else. 

The sun had only just set, but Bull was already cold. He shivered a little despite himself. It was a new feeling, to be this cold. Even Orlais’ rainy season, even in with snow up to his ankles, was nothing like this. Malika lit a fire using flint and steel without asking. Vivenne passed around the dried meat and hardtack that was their staple here in the desert, off-set with prickled pears they scrounged from the spiny desert flora. But none tonight. 

Bull sat back on his haunches, let his jaw grind tasteless beef into a wet pulp. He thought of all the meat spoiling on that dragon, miles away. But not too far, all things considered. Still time to convince Malika to go back. 

The walk and setting up camp had steadied Malika some; she’d lost the demanding hardness she wielded earlier in the day. Probably because no rocks had fallen out of Bull’s nose or ass on the walk up. She perched on a boulder, legs folded under her, and considered him. But her fingers knitted together nervously. For the first time, under the wide expanse of the sky, she seemed as small as she really was. 

Because there was no guarantee a flood of other shit wouldn’t gush out of him, he realized. She had to sit far from him. Be wary. Look at him like one of Dagna’s experiments—at arm’s length, unsure if miracles would pour out of the sides or if the ground would swallow them all up, like sucking marrow from a bone. 

“So,” she said. “You feeling any different?” 

It was a stupid question, and she knew it. He just looked at her. 

“Physically,” supplied Vivienne. She exchanged a sideways look with Malika. She hadn’t lost the mantle of calm she’d been carrying like a crown since it happened. This was where Vivienne excelled—the eye in the storm, the one who could take note of all and evaluate. She touched her throat. “

He took his time to swallow the last mouthful of hardtack—it rasped on the way down—and shrugged. “Fine,” he said. “Sore, I guess. But fine.” 

Vivienne rested her chin on her hand, and said, “Do they ever test for magic under the Qun?” She keenly understood when to be blunt and went to be soft; it was one of Vivienne’s best qualities. But there wasn’t a sound approach here; the thought was insane. 

Bull couldn’t help himself. He laughed. Vivienne smoothed her robe. The shadows in the fire made it glimmer, like a river moving over her flesh. 

“The Qun doesn’t test for magic,” Bull said flatly, finally. “You just work until you cross the line.” 

“The line?” Malika raised an eyebrow. 

“Almost everybody knows at a certain point?” Bull scratched the back of his neck. “Some older, some younger. You just go on until it ends.” He thought about a different way of putting it. “Until they stop watching you.” 

“Needle in hand,” Dorian muttered. He couldn’t sit still; he rose to his feet, pacing back and forth. 

Bull felt all the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, but made his face slide into stone. Sure, it happened. Malika opened her mouth, the shape twisted in a scold, and Vivienne placed a hand on her arm. “Unhelpful, my dear,” she said. 

“Listen,” Bull said. “I got caught by that weird shit pouring out of its mouth. It was old. I’ll be off-kilter for a couple days.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Can’t we just be grateful I’m not a pile of wet soot and move on?” 

“You vomited diamonds,” Malika snapped, out of patience. “It’s not a blow to the head.” 

He hardened his voice against the panic starting to wind around his spine. “Yeah, boss, and we’ll see how it pans out.” 

“It’s magic,” said Dorian suddenly, sharp as a knife, “it doesn’t _pan out._ ” 

The word, in Dorian’s mouth, struck Bull like a dart through his flesh. Vivienne’s question had been general enough not to incite the roar within, but that was—an accusation. 

Malika suddenly snatched her pack, upending it and pouring the mound of gems into the sand. Raw, he noticed, a little dull in the firelight. But several sported polished sides, smooth and shining in the firelight. As though run the plane of a gemcutter’s tool. _My throat_ , Bull thought. _My tongue._

They regarded the pile silently for a moment. It’s as strange as it was hours ago. Malika bit her lip and took one of the larger stones. Size of a walnut—no wonder it was so hard to get them out. Her entire arm tensed as though a needle pricked her palm. 

She tossed it across to him; the chill threatened to burn a hole through his hand, calluses and all. And then it eased, at home in his palm. 

“Shit,” he said, because it was the only thing he could think to say. 

“They’re still cold,” said Malika helplessly. Vivienne snatched one from the pile herself, rolling it between her fingers. He watched it carefully. The gem was too frigid for her to even hold for more than a minute. Dorian rolled one back and forth between his palms. 

“We’ll make a fortune on chilled drinks,” he said, before tossing it back to the pile and rubbing his hands together to warm them again. 

Bull rolled forward onto his knees and scooped the gems into his hands, sand and all. He wandered several feet outside the tent, knelt down again, and began to place them in precise, even rows. Nine diamonds each, perfectly placed. There were thirty-six of them, and they felt like nothing more than pebbles in his fingers. 

He went back to the camp. All three of them stared at him. 

“Bull,” said Malika. 

“They need the sun,” he said. It had the same effect as slamming a door shut. They stared at him openly. He laid down, turning away, not bothering to spread out his bedroll. He was a little too close to the fire, but it wasn’t a new thing for him to take up a lot of space. 

A handful of minutes later, the sand shifted beside him and Vivienne sat, posture-perfect on a blanket next to him. She folded her hands in her lap, and gave him a knowing look. 

“I’m first watch,” she said. “Try to sleep.” 

Can’t walk in line. Can’t sleep alone. Bull looked at the bluffs in the distance. You didn’t spot many old Qunari. The ones who made it long enough tended to find their way to the cliffs of Par Vollen before their legs went, or their eyes. Before they filled their beds with shit, and their mouths hung slack with boiled oats. Either option was a honest way to go. 

None of the rocks were anywhere near high enough. He’d only break his legs, or his back, and he wasn’t one for a half-assed job. 

Vivienne touched his arm with the tip of her finger. “If you stir, I’ll wake you.” 

He grunted. 

“Bull,” she said, unwavering. He leaned into the sound. “The smallest of children survive their sleep for years and years without any help.” She caught his gaze. It softened him. “No one will take you tonight. You have my word.” 

He closed his eye, determined to simply play at sleep. But the day had wrung him like wet linen, nerves frayed to the last thread. Sleep came quick, black and dreamless. 

~~~ 

Black, dreamless, and cold enough to make him piss a snowstorm. Even in sleep, he knew he rolled back and forth, trying to find a warm patch in the sand, trying to scoot close enough to the fire. 

He woke in the morning to the sharp cry of “Bull. Up. _Up!”_ and a hand shaking at his shoulder. Static skirting over his clavicle. 

He forced his eye open, and Vivienne leaned over him, anxiety clearly written all over her face. “Turn over,” she said urgently, and he did as she asked on instinct. He heard Dorian’s breath, sucked in between his teeth. 

It took Bull a second to realize what had happened—he pushed himself up onto his knees, and saw he was on the opposite side of the campfire. 

“You rolled onto it,” Dorian said, a little blearily. 

Vivienne was at his back, examining. “He’s not hurt. No marks. ” 

“I was cold,” said Bull, stupidly, and he felt the heavy press of both their gazes slowly turn on him. 

“You were _cold?”_ repeated Dorian, slowly, eyes drawn back to the circle of coals. 

“That’s what I said.” He gritted his teeth. “What do you want?” 

Malika’s voice then, from near the ruin. “Vivienne, take Dorian to scout for provisions.”

It was the last thing he expected her to say, and Dorian shared the sentiment. “You can’t be serious.” 

She cocked her head. “Excuse me?” 

“Where, exactly?” Dorian asked. He was good at that, gaining clarity while just brushing up the edge of complaint. “It’s empty.” 

Malika gestured to the wide open desert. “Anywhere,” she said. “Check the traps we set near the last camp. Find some game, or those wrinkled tubers. Prickle pears. Lizards. _Yes,_ lizards. We should scavenge and save what we can. I don’t want to go running back to the stronghold every week.”

Vivienne looked between them—Bull and Malika, and then at Dorian. She gave one small shake of her head. “I can’t say that’s the wisest--” 

But Malika furrowed her brow, arms crossed tight as a winch. “Go,” she said. “That’s an order. I’ll signal if there’s a problem.” 

They finally went, and Bull watched until their figures became small in the distance. 

“Come on,” said Malika. “Help me dig out the entrance.” 

Malika had a trowel; Bull used his hands. Good work. Sweat ran down his back in the sun. He watched her tuck down to examine a rune uncovered by the door—she looked small again, next to the ruin. Next to him. 

He figured Dorian and Vivienne wouldn’t have a problem, in the moment. He’d hardly be the first—thing they’d taken down. But as he watched Malika scrape at a rune with the tip of a long, thin scalpel, he cleared his throat. 

“Boss,” he said, finally. “Do you get what what this means?” 

Malika was only half-listening. “Hm?” 

“If you had to take me down, do you know how you’d do it?” His mouth was dry. 

The _skritch-skritch_ of her tool never paused. “Your ankle’s not great,” she said. “And you don’t get back on your feet too fast when you go down.” 

But Malika detested needless violence, never sentenced an Inquisition enemy to death. Bluffing for his benefit. “That’s not really your way, though,” he said, her rules sliding one-by-one across his mind. 

“You’re not _you_ anymore, if that happens,” she offered as explanation. Her tone never wavered. “Just like anybody else. I’d figure it out.” 

Her tone, blissfully matter-of-fact. The most calming handful of words he’d heard in the past twenty-four hours. No attempt at comfort. Only the truth. It was enough to block out, just for a second, the straightforwardness of that destiny—a demon reaching out of Bull like he was nothing but eggshell. 

He ducked his head, throat closing in familiar ache that had shit to do with the cold. 

The incessant scratching finally hesitated. Malika turned her head to look up at him. “Bull,” she said. When he didn’t answer, she cleared her throat. “ _Bull._ ” 

He looked down at her. “You think you’re the only one to wake up one morning and everything’s different?” she asked him, plain as day, and he blinked. She wiggled her left hand. “Dwarves don’t even dream. Whole new world.” 

“You do fine,” Bull said. And she did. He made a quick habit of watching her like hawk after joining the Inquisition. One of those rare types—not built for power, so she used it with the precision of a dinner fork spearing a chunk of stew-meat, and nothing more. Simple. Bent on devouring knowledge. On that note, she never missed a meal—gone with an empty belly more often than not growing up. 

She had her tells. Could go without violence. Death rattled her, even after years of dealing with the Carta. She’d been stone silent after Haven, retreated to her tent and refused to see anyone until Josephine blustered her way inside by faking frostbite. Once she made a decision, there was no swaying her. She held course like a dog Bull had seen in a poor village ten miles from Val Royeaux—a skinny little thing, dragging a rotten horse leg through the street. 

And now, she rolled her eyes. “I do all right,” she said. “You didn’t see me shaking through Haven. But it wasn’t a cakewalk.” She paused, wool-gathering. “Adamant was the pits. The Fade can stay shut.” 

He was careful not to show too much interest. “Yeah?” he asked. “Too many demons?” 

She shrugged. “Demons here, demons there. Whatever.” Her needle picked at the rune again. “I don’t like being caught in traps. No way in, no way out. It’s not even death. Just too close to being stuck forever.”

Silence, after that. She pocketed her needle and went back to digging with her trowel. Bull followed suit. When they finally dug down to the jamb, she considered it with her hands on her hips. “Well, shit,” she said. 

“What?” 

Malika kicked it gently with her foot. “You won’t fit,” she said. “Not even if you squeeze.” 

He eyed it. Even if he scrunched down small as he could, he’d never make it. He laughed in spite of himself. “Let me get the door for you, at least,” he said. 

She chuckled. “So polite.” 

And then he pressed his hands against the door to test it. 

A jolt of electricity bolted through him from fingertip to scalp, a hard static that filled his ears with a numb ringing. He tried to pull his hands away but couldn’t; every movement sent another jarring wave through his body. “Boss,” he managed, but not loud enough. 

Music, then, tuneless and thin. A razor wind catching the mouth of a flute. _Crack, crack._ He took a breath in; when he exhaled, it was a long cloud of white fog. And his hands were frozen to the door. 

Ice coated them flat, shackled itself around his wrists, and he watched it begin its slow journey by inches up his arms. 

Bull had been in countless battles before, taken by surprise by enemies legion—‘Vints cloaked in shadow by moonlight, a demon that stood up and stretched out of his cooking fire, coals falling from its lithe, sinuous body. They had caught him, once. Fog Warriors, out of nothing but dust. Pus-tasting leather shoved in his mouth to gag him. Everybody else, carved to pieces. Did it in front of him, too. Didn’t know why. It wasn’t his squad, wasn’t his day to be out, wasn’t his call. They thought he had information, thought they could draw it out of his skull through his nose. He had nothing. He was barely Ben-Hassrath. They cut off two of his fingers before some Stens happened to stumble upon the camp. _That Hissrad_ , one of them said, heating up the flat of his dagger to cauterize where blood poured from his hand, _lucky as a fucking dog._

And his head stayed firmly rooted between his shoulders. Even in the worst of it, the worst shit, his stomach turning, blood on his face, the only one left alive: he gritted his jaw and stayed in place. It was all he could do, all he had power over. Don’t panic. 

But he had no defense for the slow creep of cold consuming inch by inch, and the harder his heart pounded the quicker it decided to glide across his grey skin, the flexed muscles, the hairs of his arm. Bull opened his mouth to say _Boss, get over here_ but it died in his throat. 

Confusion. Emptiness. The two aligned and then ate each other like twin serpents, and Bull was left with nothing. 

The memories turned over and over as the ice crept up his flesh, braiding themselves into one until he couldn’t tell where they began and ended. He didn’t understand how they knew how to do that, how they could wind and writhe around one another until the touchstones he knew as reality vanished. How the thought of that power curled his blood. He tried to place details, remind himself that they had passed, that he was free and only touched by ice in the center of a blazing desert, that nothing was the same, but—instead each tendon of his body flexed, ready to run, ready to pull off and leave his hands frozen against the door if that was required. 

Sharp pain at his temple. Malika stood there, eyes blazing, fist raised. “I’ve been calling your name,” she panted, and looked back out at the wide desert. She’d hit him; he barely felt it. “They’ll be back soon. You have to keep calm.” 

“’m calm,” grunted Bull, and then the ice shivered over his shoulders in a satin cloak. 

“And I’m the Empress of Orlais,” she muttered, hiking up the dune until she could stand on the roof of the ruins once more. She waved her arms back and forth, signaling. It didn’t take long, and then Vivienne was perched at his side, examining his frozen form with an arched brow and nothing more. 

“Bull,” she said, epitome of peace, “don’t panic.” 

“I’m fine,” he informed her. A raw vein streaked his voice. “This ruin’s trying to eat me and I haven’t broken a sweat.” 

“It’s not the ruin, Bull.” She was curt. He couldn’t move, couldn’t avoid the cut of her gaze. She could pin him with dagger-like precision. 

“Get Dorian to melt me out of it,” he demanded. 

“He can’t.” Vivienne examined the ice. It had begun to slide down his back with long claws. She tapped it with her fingernail. It rang out like a chime, and reverberated all the way to his windpipe. Solid. “This is you.” 

He growled a little under his breath. “I’m not--”

“This is you,” she said again, no time for his protests. “You, trying to protect yourself.” 

Bull stared at her blankly. “I’m not,” he said, and this time his voice was steady with the truth. 

“When I touch this ruin,” Vivienne said, demonstrating with a tap of her fingers, “its history tries to breathe through me. It sparks.” 

“We call it—well.” Dorian’s voice from above. He sat, legs curled beneath him on the eaves of the ruin’s roof. Leaned over to examine the goings-on below. Giving space. If Bull could reach up, he could hold the toe of his boot. “A calling.” 

“Creative,” said Bull. 

“Old things,” Vivienne surmised, “ancient and full of magic, sense their kin, and reach out. Our bodies react to it, like striking flint and steel together. Reacting. Communicating.” 

“They try to talk,” Bull said dully. 

“They try to talk.” Vivienne nodded. “I imagine it stung a little.” 

Bull’s nostrils flared. The implication—in that instant he heard Dalish’s high, musical laugh, the dance of her accent upon the words. _Boss,_ she said. _It’s like you pricked your finger and thought the world was ending. Come on, now._

“Get me out,” he demanded suddenly, pulling back hard against the ice. His skin ached from the stretch. It would rip soon, bleed if he wasn’t careful. Could be worse. Half the Ben-Hassrath he knew had scars up and down their hands from peeling their own skin away to get out of shackles under enemy hold. Either that or let yourself die. Qunari, for all their sacrifices, wedded themselves to life and all its enormity, and weren’t keen on letting it go until it was time. 

He thought of last night, lying there, wondering about how high he’d have to climb the bluffs to do the job. Bile washed up his throat. He pulled again, harder. 

“Steady,” said Malika. 

“Take a deep breath,” Vivienne added. “Tantrums won’t help.” 

Bull closed his eyes and thought, _get the fuck away from me_ , over and over, in and out with each breath, like a mantra. Minutes passed, then a quarter of an hour. He opened his eye. Nothing had changed. 

“Well,” said Dorian, “at least it’s not worse.” 

“Dorian.” That was Vivienne, and he heard him sigh. 

“Anathema at its finest,” Dorian went on, unable to bear his own wisdom. “What impossibility. Think of where he comes from, Madame Vivienne. It’s not possible. You can’t detest magic and try do it at the same time.” 

“You can beat it into submission,” Bull rumbled lowly, eyes focused on his own hands. 

Dorian laughed, high and humorless. “Like cutting off your own hand and still expecting it to swing your axe against your enemies. Tell me how that works out.” He leaned over to examine where Bull’s hands were still frozen to the door, examined where the slow crawl of the ice had stopped halfway down Bull’s back. He raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you won’t have to tell me.” 

“Some space,” Vivienne ordered, in a tone that brokered no argument. “Inquisitor. If you would.” 

Malika stood and motioned Dorian away. He rolled his eyes and launched himself to his feet, following. “As though I’m speaking out of my arse,” he said, as he followed her out of Bull’s sight. 

No more passed between them until their voices faded far away. Vivienne leaned against the wall of the ruin and crossed her arms. Bull gave a soft sigh of relief. 

“Iron Bull,” she said, “he’s not wrong.” 

Bull felt his lips curl back into a snarl. She held up a hand. 

“You put yourself here,” Vivienne reminded him, tilting her head. “Get yourself out of it.” 

“How?” he muttered, voice low as the depths of the ruin under their feet. 

“I don’t know,” she said, and smoothed her robe. “What I know, Bull, is that you must choose to do it. You cannot expect it to vanish of its own accord. It did not begin this—“ She wrapped her knuckles against the door, “—just to meddle with you.” 

“I’m not—“ he began. 

“You are.” Vivienne pinned him with a look that could shatter the ice coating his flesh, were she committed enough. “You think it will decide to fade away and free you. You think you can convince it to leave you alone. It is magic, Iron Bull. You must lead it, or it will yank you by the throat.” 

The snarl curled upon his face again. “No,” he said.

Vivienne’s eyebrow arched. “To which piece?” she asked. 

“All of them.” His vision began to go grey at the edges. “I’m not doing magic and I’m not letting it tug me around by the balls. There’s alternatives. Other means. Anything. Not those.” 

To put himself into somebody else’s hands—not so different than another re-education. The Qun taught that when _saarebas_ bowed to the _arvaraad_ , the snip of the needle and thread, the chain and scepter, it was goodness. A service. They honored them for what they did. Qunari existed in number; no burden was ever shouldered alone. They breathed and fought and lived as one. 

To give in. He’d lived with it for a day and a handful of hours, and he couldn’t imagine another ten minutes with it crawling under his skin, let alone sleeping that night, let alone when demons came to hump his brain for a beast to ride. The thought—the thought of passing himself over into her hands, bending his head to the collar, and letting other fingers pull the fear out of him, wind it into something good, something _useful_ , to know better than he did, and change the course--

Relief. Enough for a whole breath. Just for a moment. 

Until Vivienne’s lips settled into a smile—a real smile. His stomach knotted up. Too gentle. And sad. “Oh, Bull,” she said. “If only either of those were a choice.” 

He looked down at the ground because he could no longer bear to look at her and the truth looking straight into his soul from her face. The relief slipped into his stomach, where it curdled with shame on how seriously he’d thought of it, the empty purity of that breath. It’d be easier, yeah. But the fucking _price._

They never talked about cost under the Qun. They wrapped it up in one neat, quick word— _sacrifice—_ and trusted your common sense to figure out what that meant. How heavy it weighed on your arm when you were clutching it in your fist. 

(A memory, emerging with the sudden alarm of a cracked tooth. When he was a kid, long before he was Hissrad, he killed a tiger that strayed too close to their little outcropping of homes at the edge of Par Vollen. It was young—hardly grown, but big enough Bull grabbed a spear and three other bodies and tried to drive it away. It fought back, and they ended up hauling a carcass home that night. 

His tama said nothing. Her eyes went quiet. She wasn’t loud as a habit. Spared her words. Fastidious about books, her loom, the way they learned and thought. She found laughter an easy chore, though, especially when it came to him—the night he didn’t sleep, terrified by the thought of the Qun operating as one living being, the thought of them all snoring in tandem. But her eyes went quiet, then. Silent. 

They had brought him in. His tama and one more, some officers. Made him sit at a table. Lanterns burning low. Mosquitoes humming against the windowpanes. Dense and humid even in the deep night. They put a scepter in front of him. Obsidian, hand-crafted, heavy as a new limb. They made him hold it in his hand, adjust it in his grip. 

His tama said, _It’s yours, if you want it._

The question confused him. He tried to turn it into emptiness, into a willing void to be filled, but it never worked. He cocked his head. Nobody exchanged a look. Nobody even shifted their feet. Unreadable as sand. 

_If you take it_ , his tama said again, _you’re the one driving chaos. You decide the when and where of miracles. You control._

They didn’t ask questions under the Qun. No one asked what you wanted. They simply knew. This was what he had always thought, growing up, and now the room seemed too small for all five of their bodies. He kept his face stone, even as his heart began to pump and pump. Said nothing. Did nothing. 

_Imekari_ , she pressed gently. 

One of the officers took a step forward, pressed his fist against the table. _You take it,_ he said, _and tame the wild. We need more. It begins today._

Words disappeared. He stared at the black scepter until his tama gently pushed it forward, and spoke a name: _Arvaraad._

He said nothing. He sat there there until each person had left, and he was left in the room alone with that—tool. That’s all it was. And in the morning, he had left the room, and the tool on the table. And that was all. No one had ever spoken of it again.)

Both sides, now. The weight of the chain would kill him before anything else would, if it didn’t raze the person holding the leash first. He knew it. His stomach lurched—he had to duck his head, breathe deep so the contents of his belly wouldn’t make a repeat of the day before. 

Long moments passed in utter silence. She was patient and he closed his eye tight. His throat ached in constant complaint. 

Finally, Vivienne exhaled a breath and said, as gently as fingers on the nape of his neck, “Think of a sheath, my dear. Put away the sword.” 

He said nothing, but she continued on with quiet confidence. “This is a shield,” she said. “Armor you have grown from within. A method of protection, strong and good.” That was debatable, but he let her talk. “Yet you must put it away. There is nothing to hurt you here.” 

_Forward_ , her voice pushed. _Move forward._ He could try. 

So it was about visualizations. The Qunari still living in him could understand that—the alchemy of the mind. He wasn’t agreeing to anything, that was for fucking sure. Attempting to make this back down didn’t mean a thing—just like a retreat wasn’t giving in. A retreat meant to regroup, to hone the weapon and the plan till it could cut just the right way. No dishonor in it. He’d learned that early. 

It was just a start, so they could get to the next place, the way to understanding how to cut this out of him like a pox. Make it vanish. He sure as shit couldn’t do anything while frozen to a ruin. Figure out how to grind it under his boot heel. Make it back down. 

“Put it aside,” said Vivienne again, and he nodded. He could feel the shift from her at the acknowledgment. She leaned forward a little, encouraged. “You can.” 

The logic didn’t work in his brain—danger was everywhere, even if you couldn’t see it, even in this desert where you could see for four miles easy in each cardinal direction. It never faded, never went away. The second he bought into that, the second they were mincemeat. They’d seen that with the dragon, hadn’t they? A tree was never just a tree. He had to be on alert. He carried little armor and an axe the size of the Inquisitor. There was no sheath for his vigilance. 

He closed his eye and turned within. It made the soothing notes of Vivienne’s voice stop—the sound of it soothed him too much, made it distraction easy. He pulled in, scoured his brain for a solution, a tool to wield, a drop of honey in the desert of his own panic. 

_The tide rises, the tide falls._ An answer, lined in quicksilver, appeared at the edge of his mind. _The tide falls. The tide falls._

A bit of the Qun. As a fresh face on Seheron, Bull set large chunks of the verse into his memory, a stone foundation that couldn’t be beaten out. Shade to fall under during hard times, when the sun scorched the earth and everything seemed lost. That, at least, he could share with the insipid chanters muttering outside every Chantry from Denerim to Val Chevin. The word held weight. 

_The tide rises, the tide falls._ There was more, before and after, but it suited. The balance made the tide what it was: rush too far forward and it became a flood, pull back too hard and it became drought. Neither was applicable here, only the knowledge that whatever this was, whatever held him steady against this stone door, was rocked to and fro in the same rhythm as the breath of the world. 

_The tide falls._ Three words wound themselves around his bones. _The tide falls._ It was not a negotiation. It could not be refused in the universe. Tides receded. No debate could change the sea, no mental chess, no well placed quip, no walls of stone. _The tide falls._

Water dripped down the muscles of his back. Vivienne breathed in. 

_The tide falls._ Cold crept back inside him, the first frigid breath of morning. Pain prickled along his throat, his lungs, his gut. It didn’t matter. There was nothing to struggle against. Bull had coexisted with pain for longer than his mind held memory. An old friend. _The tide falls._ He could hear the ice dripping into the sand at his feet—impossible, but now was not the time to question it. 

He could move his fingers, his palms still stuck solid to the stone door. He took another breath. Imagined the inexorable pull, the relief the tide encompassed as it slid back into the changeless sea, unquestioned. 

And then, as easy as anything, it released Bull, and he opened his eye. Adrenaline pounded in his ears, suddenly, now that the threat was gone—the shackles cast away by whatever means necessary. He rubbed his wrists, the flesh cold and clammy despite the sunlight. 

Vivienne pursed her lips. _The tide fell_ , Bull almost said, but was caught by the way her gaze tilted up over his shoulder. Without thinking he turned. Malika, staring at him in wonder. Dorian, arms crossed, mouth drawn in a sharp, unforgiving line. 

~~~

Even before the sun went down, Bull’s teeth started to chatter, but he purposefully took the first watch, set himself as far from the fire as he could. Waited till the soft sounds of sleep rose and fell from each one of them before pulling his bedroll around his shoulders like an old grandmother hobbling around the marketplace. Hardly helped anything, but the press of the blanket against his skin gave the illusion of comfort. Memory of what transpired that day against the door nipped at his cold skin. He did not let himself consider it. Did not dwell on possibility. Only thought, with pointed focus, that there was much blight to burn out from beneath his skin. 

Malika woke halfway through the night to hold the watch, waved at him wordlessly to give him the signal as she stretched, yawned. Bull lay down in his spot and closed his eyes. Thought again about burrowing into the sand to find whatever heat lingered there. His ears perked at the sound of Malika standing, treading carefully through camp. She went to the side of the tent where he knew his rows of diamonds had laid out in the sun all day, and now under the moon. He’d forgotten them. He listened to her open her pack and pluck the gems from the sand, store them away. She did it quickly, with two hands, as though touching something very hot, or very cold. But Bull knew which one it was. 

Vivienne woke to take her watch, over him and the camp. Again, he protested against sleep, and again, his dreams were wracked with cold and nothing else. 

When Bull woke in the morning, Dorian stood over the fire, kicking sand into the pit. The door to the ruins, flung open, revealed darkness and a very narrow set of stairs leading down and down. 

The only evidence of Vivienne and Malika was their bedding, tightly rolled and set aside against the stone wall. A skein of water and a handful of dried salt pork, wrapped in a handkerchief, rested near his head. He sat up and gnawed into his breakfast. Dorian waited until he finished before he said, “Vivienne’s gone below.” 

“I figured.” Bull’s tongue pressed against a cut adorning the inside of his cheek, the pain bright with salt-sting. 

He cleared his throat. Twitchy this morning. “We won’t be going far out,” he said. “But we can’t stay up against the ruins like this.” 

Wouldn’t really be a patrol if they did, but Bull just rubbed his thumb between his eyebrows, trying to press out a dull headache. This had been their routine with each new exploration—someone went inside with Malika, and the other two patrolled the desert, keeping an eye out, tracking Venatori, killing the odd varghest. He sheathed his axe on his back, and followed Dorian out of camp. The sun, rich and warm, rested on his shoulders. But Bull knew distinctly it was less warm than the day before. He placed the truth of that just far enough out of reach so he couldn’t touch it, couldn’t think too hard about what it meant. 

They didn’t even make it out a quarter mile before Dorian eyed the camp and thrust his staff into the sand. “Here,” he said. “This will do.” 

Bull raised an eyebrow. “You tired already?” he asked. “Pick up your staff. Visibility’s good out here. Let’s go farther.” 

“No.” Dorian eyed the distance between where they stood and their camp once more. “This will do.” 

“No?” Bull argued. “This is a shit loop for a patrol.”

Silence, then. Dorian turned to look at him. “Bull,” he said. “We’re not on patrol.” 

He blinked. 

Dorian’s gaze narrowed; he took a breath as though already trying to quell some rising annoyance in his chest. “You’re starting today,” he said, after a moment of trying to gather the right words. “Meditation, probably. We might try very simple casting, if it seems plausible.” 

A roar echoed in Bull’s ears at the word _casting_. “Not on your life,” he said plainly, because there was nothing else to say. 

“Vivienne said—“ Dorian measured his words with a hard-edged patience, lined them with the threat of its disappearance, “—you were ready and willing. To begin. To be taught.” 

Words jostled against each other in Bull’s throat, a hard knot of rage against his windpipe. “I’m not,” he managed to say, and then went quiet. 

Dorian’s nostrils flared. “That much is obvious,” he muttered, and turned to look at the camp again. 

“We need to scout the area,” Bull pushed. “Make sure there’s nothing skulking around.” 

He watched his feeble attempt nearly work—the way the tension shifted along Dorian’s spine, the way a snake might pull back to squint at its enemy, to flick its tongue out and taste the air. Blood and sweat on the hot breeze. _Venatori_ , he said without making a sound. Or desert beasts. Or danger. Why they’d come. Why they were needed. Both of them could do it, could use it. 

They had only come across a couple camps in the Wastes. It was a whole lot of nothing out here, peppered with outcroppings ripe for the hiding. The ‘Vints were looking for ruins too, needed whatever lay below. More dragons. Varghests. Whatever made its home out here. 

But then Dorian turned, squinted at him and said, “That won’t work, Iron Bull.” He turned to walk down the dune into a little valley where they would find wind cover. And privacy, Bull thought. It was an empty desert, but that didn’t mean Dorian liked to do things out in the open. He couldn’t have cared less. 

It didn’t then, Bull thought. But Dorian’s patience was far from limitless. What he wasn’t prepared for was the way Dorian folded his arms and said, “Better dangers to attend to.” 

Bull’s nostrils flared, and he opened his mouth—and Dorian merely held up a finger. “Aren’t you supposed to know this already?” he said tiredly. “ _A blossom, a bee,_ the sting we smash into little bits before it hurts anyone.” 

“I’m not--”

Dorian said, “The most dangerous thing living in a two mile radius is you.” He ran his tongue over his teeth. “At the moment.” 

Bull didn’t know why he thought of the Chargers now—all of them, a collection of misfits from every blackened corner of Thedas, fought and nipped at one another, like to sharpen their teeth against each others’ hides. Like any family. A purpose, more or less. Bull had never lost his temper with them. Not even when Krem led them straight into a bandit hide-out that he should have seen coming a mile away. Not when Grim gambled away half their take from a job that had cost them three men. Not when they’d lost folks. Lost family. No point in balling up his rage like a fist and taking it to anyone’s jaw. He saved it for the next bandit they came across. Used it like a tool. Waste not, want not. 

In a word, he didn’t indulge. Anger had no purpose. But with a sentence, with the curl of a lip, the point of his glance—Dorian dissolved whatever control Bull manufactured to keep himself tightly in check. It rippled beneath his skin. He found himself leaning into it. Made his blood run a little hotter. Made him forget the shivers making gooseflesh rise on his arms, the back of his neck, even as they sweated in the hot sun. 

“You and I both know that’s bullshit,” he said lowly. 

“Persist that way, if you wish.” Dorian ran his fingers along his brow, flicked the sweat into the sand. “I can’t wait to see what you freeze next.” 

His molars ground down hard against each other. “It’s all happened to me,” Bull muttered. “Nobody else. I can handle it.” 

Dorian began walking around where they stood in a wide circle, surveying the space. “No doubt,” he said. “A mage’s body is made for magic.” Bull did not respond to either of those words, only the veins in his neck tightened, try to push their way out of his skin. “You touched a ruin full of it, spooked a little, nearly killed yourself, and we fixed it.” 

“Won’t make a habit of it.” Bull refused to turn to look at him. “Easy enough to avoid.” Strategy, tactics, and knowing old shit was off limits now. He worked with one eye, a crippled knee, and a lack of fingers. Avoiding a type of place was just another tick on the list. 

“What a waste,” Dorian said. “You could learn it. Start with the small things until it becomes—another hand, essentially.” A wrinkle appeared on his brow. “A limb, ready to be used at will, instead of—well. Whatever it is now. Under your power.” He exhaled. 

“Yeah,” Bull said. “But I’m not after that.” 

Dorian made the mistake of showing his relief after the first word—then the sharp surprise and indignation at what followed. Not so fast, Bull thought, steady as stone. 

A pause. Dorian’s eyebrows grazed his hairline. “What?” he asked, voice curiously light. 

“I don’t want what happened yesterday,” he said slowly, clearly, in case Dorian couldn’t hear, “to ever happen again. That’s all.” 

Dorian fluttered his fingers. “Little wishes and dreams,” he said. He clicked his tongue, paced away. “What happens next time you touch the Inquisitor?” 

The aching silence of the desert stretched far. The bluffs stood sentinel in the distance. Bull didn’t turn. His tongue went limp in his mouth. 

Dorian walked helpfully back into view, adjusting one of the buckles of his shirt. He let the silence sit there. When he spoke, his voice was quieter than usual, as though balancing a heavy weight. “Malika’s no mage, to be sure,” he told him. “But that Anchor opens portals to the Fade, sews tears in the Veil with all the ease of a seamstress.” He squinted at the ruin just beyond the dunes—not even a quarter of a mile off. Bull did not turn to look. “That shitty dwarven basement could only hope to hold a fraction of the power she carries in her little finger.” 

“So you’re careful.” Dorian’s voice, quiet and—Bull pushed his mind to focus on the tone, the languid ease that lined his voice, except when he squawked when bloodied on the battlefield. It ached. As as though brushing against old bruises. “You keep your hands to yourself. It will work for a time, I imagine. Longer than you thought it could. But one day you’ll need to pull her out of the way of a spear, or fire, and whatever you have will...”

He trailed off with a little gesture of his fingers. 

“Ignite,” Bull said, though it wasn’t the right word. Dorian nodded. 

“Burst open,” he provided, almost as a suggestion, and Bull inclined his head slightly. Dorian’s shoulders straightened then, firm and sturdy. “You won’t have time to panic for an hour before Vivienne and I come to the rescue.” 

No shit. Bull gripped his hand in a fist, then made it loosen, finger by finger. Muscle by muscle. He watched the long quiet fill Dorian with discomfort. Then his legs folded beneath him, and then he sat upon the ground, hands tucked in his lap. He peered up at Bull. Nothing too different about it. But then he cocked his head, and the look in his eyes changed. 

It had been stupidly easy to diagnose. He wrinkled his nose at Bull like a physics problem, or a line of untranslatable text on an ancient stone. And now—before he could put a name to it, Dorian thumbed at his chin and said, “You’ve got to know a thing before you hit it, don’t you?” 

Curiosity. And nothing else.

Bull’s turn to furrow his brow. “What?” he said. 

“You’re a spy.” Dorian rested his chin on his knuckles. “Before you fight it or fuck it, you’ll want to know how it works.” He reached out and touched the sand in front of him. “And that’s all I’m asking.” 

And then the wheedling stopped. He stopped talking, looked up at Bull, and waited for him to make a choice. 

Vivienne thought this was a good idea. The thought stuck up in the back of his mind like a rogue weed. Vivienne would not entrust this to Dorian unless it was sound in her view. She had a _feel_ now, in the back of his head. Static electricity, the faint buzz of strong air before a storm. The smell of water, sunk with salt. Before, she was a collection of thoughts, observations, an image of her face wrought in his brain. His mind no longer flipped through those details—instead it pushed deeper, stranger. 

To his own surprise, Bull felt his knees shift until he sat down across from him, carefully shifting his bad leg. He felt Dorian’s eyes catalog the movement. Probably thought it was some grand show of vulnerability. Trust. A bad leg was a bad leg. Bull didn’t believe in being sentimental about the surface. 

“It’ll feel like you want to reach inward—don’t.” Dorian’s voice, to his credit, was crisp and matter of fact and did not reflect an inch of victory. “It’s more like… weighing yourself against the scales. You, the world, and where you sit.” 

Bull squinted at him in the sun. 

“ _Fasta vass,_ just close your eyes.” Dorian brushed sand from his lap pointedly. “Breathe in and out, and stop thinking---” 

“I know how to meditate,” Bull said. “That it?” 

“It’s focus,” Dorian corrected, “not meditation. Focus has a point. Meditation is rather self-centered.” He sniffed. “Masturbatory.” 

“Well shit,” said Bull, because it was easy, “if that’s all you want--” 

“Don’t say it,” Dorian said. 

“--Any Qunari worth his salt can take himself in hand,” he finished. “Just say the word.” 

He said nothing in return, but closed his eyes with a great deal of conviction. 

“Keep those open,” said Bull, and Dorian’s eyelashes parted so quickly it caught him off guard. Something rumbled in his chest. Desert rations didn’t sit well with him. That was all. But he’d been silent too long, now, and Dorian squinted at him. “One of us needs to keep a watch.” 

Dorian made a noise, but then all was silent, except for the wind brushing against the stone bluffs, ruffling the threadbare trees. Bull closed his eyes. 

You usually meditated to the metronome of your own breath—that was what the tamassrans taught, against rash anger, deep sorrow, the grappling claws of the past. You built walls with it, bricks in the fortress. 

But Bull had never used his breath, and he’d either fooled his tama or she’d noticed and let him go on anyway. Probably the latter. Not much escaped her notice. Bull pressed his ear to his own heart instead, and listened to it beat, and breathed so small it nearly disappeared. What mattered was the sound. 

Sometimes he ran lines in his head, big stretches of the Qun, or letters he’d written to people long dead, and let himself tumble inside them. His visualizations were always off—made him a challenge to the tamas, the kind of rock they liked to crack—but sometimes it was the grindstone of a windmill, water sloping through the rungs of a giant wheel, grain giving itself into flour. 

The wastes had no rhythm, that’s why they were bone-empty. Varghests and blue rams, and endless sun. The fingers of life grew long and brittle out here, with little to grip. 

“Don’t go inward,” Dorian said, as though it meant something, and Bull ignored it. ‘Vints didn’t know a damn thing about patience. Gratification was instant, power snatched like a gold coin rolling over a bar table. 

So he slid deep into the slow churn of his own heart, fastidious in its step. In the Ben-hassrath they cut cadavers open to learn what a knife did under the skin, how a warhammer disintegrated a ribcage, and Bull had pumped a heart once with his big hand. 

His first thought was, _small_. He had just needed to use his fingertips. It pulled back into the palm of his hand, like it knew him as shelter. Huddled in safety. Bull pumped the heart and watched the blood push on, slide back, push on, slide back, never sliding anywhere beyond where his strength could nudge it. 

_Don’t be so tender with that shit_. That was Ashaad, with the teeth he’d honed into points with a file. _You’re not dreaming anyone back to life._ And then he’d pushed it aside, and crushed it, sinew and vessel and all. 

The memory faded, but the heart lodged in his brain, the heart for a precious minute he’d beaten, inch by inch, in a dead man’s chest, lingered. Minute. And simple. Here was a piece, a piece of everything, little enough to be held in the hand. Here was how it worked. Cradle. Squeeze. Push on. Slide back. Here was how he lived, every day, despite everything. 

_Not inward_ , Dorian said, but there was nowhere in the Wastes to consider, even if he knew what it meant. _Find your balance in the world._ More ‘Vint shit about imagining your glory. Dorian might as well have said, imagine how the world bends to kiss your feet, imagine the leashes in your hands, and all that turns to you and your power. Fuck that. 

Inside was quieter, familiar. Frigid as a bare dick in winter. 

He’d lived with worse. But he didn’t like it. 

Bull used to run hot—sweating in snowstorms, lurching around Skyhold without a coat and not for a second dreaming of detracting from the rumors that he just liked to show off. Let ‘em live on it. He steamed, sometimes, after a battle—fighting bandits in the snow, and sheltering inside a cave, little waves of white pealing off him. 

When the idea took root, it yanked Bull by the neck, and hard. That part of him still remained, somewhere. He couldn’t say why it was important, why he needed to find it, why it felt as precious as breathing, but he slid down after the fact. 

I used to be warm, he thought. Where the fuck did it go? 

Heat—imperative as breathing and shitting. Find your balance. 

If pressed, he’d never be able to write out what he saw, couldn’t draw a map. Beyond the everyday that a quill could catch and press. Bull wound a drop spindle for his tama once a week. He was the only one patient enough to do it, or perhaps she decided it for herself, and the patience came after. But he spent hours with wool, hunched over the spindle, watching it turn. It raveled, it unraveled, a thousand little fibers creaking into being. 

It was like that, if you could spin yourself into the pit of your stomach, into the belly of your heart. The beat sounded in his ears, a hard thrum. He could hear it harder now, as though hammocked in one of the arches inside the organ. It should have been warm—blood-warm, kept well by his skin. But it was empty. 

Like the Wastes, but worse, because he just topography now. A place, craggy and mottled, to hold space, where not even the sun turned a distasteful eye. It made no sense, but Bull couldn’t pull from the thought—that he held it, held emptiness, held something, held _something_ but what, he was smarter than this, he knew shit, even worse, he knew better--

He was not alone. 

The thought rang in him like a gong. He was not alone. The cold blew in, rich and fat on its own bitterness. Plentiful in the same way the sea was, rocking its weight against the sand for kicks. You are here to hold, it sang, with two blue moons for eyes. Bear it, and you’ll never be alone. His sides ached then, wretched and bare and too rigid to expand—you are here to hold, and fuck, fuck, it had wiggled in him like a maggot that night, gnawed at him till it grew strong and made him a nest. 

Then a voice, real as a tongue inside his ear, slithered inside his head. _Hissrad?_ He turned, in the darkness, and there stood a spindly limbed demon, tall as a house. A handful of eyes bugging out of its forehead, black and unfocused. 

It doesn’t see me, thought Bull for a desperate, frozen moment, and then it turned its head, cocked it curiously. Blinked. 

It moved quick, just like it did when they came across nests of them camped around rifts all over Thedas. Slid beneath (a needle, plunging trough him in a neat stitch) and reappeared an inch away, jaw open and spittle running down its lips. 

Speed was never Bull’s thing, but every muscle in his body clenched in on itself. Feet rooted to the ground. No reaching for his axe. He knew a weapon in his hand wouldn’t be good for shit. Knew full well the battleground was right here, in--

It was in him. It was _in him_. 

Its eyes clicked as they moved, the sound of cracking nuts. They examined him like a slab of meat. 

_If you come with me,_ it said, a voice like the hiss of a nest of vipers, curling around themselves in impossible knots, _I’ll give you what you want. It’s simple. You like simple._

He stared straight back at it, his hands balling themselves into fists so tight the bones protested. Veins stuck out of his arms from wrist to shoulder with the effort. 

_You like to bend, Hissrad._ It scratched at its neck with the sharp tip of one of its endless fingers. _You know it and I know it. Look at these hands._

They flexed, wide and open. _I can smooth it away._ It cocked its head at him. _Uncertainty, power. It’s not meant for you._ It took a step closer. Bull inhaled, but his feet were rooted to the spot. He was caught in its voice, the way it slid around his brain, scratching for holes. 

_Let me have it._ It slid closer, suddenly, so quick he couldn’t mark the movement. _Hissrad. Let me--_ and its long fingers drove their nails into his chest, a many-fanged spider digging in. 

For one long, horrible second--Bull’s mind went white, and empty, and nothing. It could be this. He could be the nothing, all wrapped up in the desert, with someone else at the reigns. He could sink into it. It’d be—over. 

The touch cracked it. Weight grew on his chest, thick and full of life. He started breathing harder, faster, and with each pull of air the weight sank deeper into him. _Fuck off_ , he thought desperately, and bolted for the surface, the squeeze on his heart like Ashaad’s hand, hard and merciless and he wasn’t Iron Bull any longer, no, he was a thing that could be played with and toyed with and nested in like vermin, like maggots, and how, how the fuck had he let this happen---

His eyes bolted open, and Dorian was in front of him, hands raised in reflex. His eyes were trained on Bull’s chest; Bull dipped his head and saw—a thick, molten pad of ice. Cupped like a hand at his sternum, and so heavy he thought his skin would rip and give way, and it would tumble into the sand like a ruined treasure. 

It was Dorian who broke him out of it, of course, in a moment of stupidity. 

“Don’t go inward. Don’t go inward. You contrary piece of shit,” he muttered, voice thin with anxiety, waving his hand in a precise gesture, fingers an inch from Bull’s chest, calling some spell, “Why the fuck are you so _literal?_ ” 

Self-preservation (a mage an inch away, magic on his breath like wine, and a sour look in his eyes) pulled through, made him right, and Bull snatched Dorian’s wrist in a firm grip without thinking. The magic disappeared so quickly it might as well have been sand falling from his palm. 

Dorian inhaled, perfectly still, like a sculpture. Bull’s chest hammered, but his instincts had only pulled his hand from the air in reflex, hadn’t wrenched him, hadn’t hurt him. He could slip from Bull’s fingers, step back. He didn’t. He stood there, feet rooted in the ground. Unafraid. 

His wrist, curled against the arch of Bull’s palm. Small. 

They stood there, Bull wracked in his own terror, and Dorian, breathing. In the intricate stone carvings lining Par Vollen, mage eyes were always lined with bolts of lightning, lined in thunder. A little too on the nose, Bull had always thought. Dramatic. But the Qun liked its messages firm and unmistakeable, with little room for error in interpretation. You couldn’t trust a lightning bolt any more than you could trust the stormcloud it tore itself from. Easy enough to understand. 

Dorian’s eyes were smooth and grey, like the stone, but life made them warm, and not like stone at all. 

As if on cue, he licked his chapped lips, cleared his throat a little. When he spoke, his tone was a hoarse whisper. “I’ll wait,” he said, with the indelible flair of a challenge. 

Bull’s heart rushed with challenge, the comfort of adrenaline spanning his ribcage like broad hands. He exhaled in a long, low breath, and thought _the tide rises, the tide rises, the tide rises--_

Dorian arched an eyebrow, and Bull felt the tendons of his wrist flex against the flesh of his hand. 

_The tide falls_. He landed on it squarely, a perfect blow. _The tide falls._ Let go, let go, let go. When the wet drip of the ice began to trickle down his chest, over his gut, he staggered back a step, and they let go of each other. 

Dorian folded his arms across his chest, but not before running a hand over his face. His shoulders dipped once with an exhale before pulling themselves back up again, ready as ever. 

“See what I mean?” Dorian said, and that broke whatever dream-like state had settled over Bull in the aftermath. Rage, blue and sharp, funneled his vision. He had broken his word. And Bull was stupid enough to be surprised by it. Stupid enough to get lulled into this, this---

_You’re not alone_ , echoed the back of his brain in memory, and his whole body shuddered. Ribs, rattling like prison bars. Dorian stepped forward, more words on his lips, but Bull snarled.

“You don’t listen,” he breathed, and Dorian’s eyebrows nearly grazed his hairline. He opened his mouth, but Bull gritted his teeth. “ _I’ll let you choke next time._ Remember?”

He blinked. “I--”

“Make good on your promise, or I’ll make sure you do.” The words lurched out from the pit of Bull’s stomach, lay between them like a corpse, freshly flung to the sand. 

Dorian opened and closed his mouth. “It was a little spell—I wouldn’t hurt you,” he began, but stopped at the look in Bull’s eye. 

“Your word’s thinner than shit,” Bull said. “Enough.”

“Bull--” The word was sharp with hurt, with confusion. 

“Enough,” he said again, ragged with its own weakness, and turned back to the camp. Dorian stood there, empty handed, and watched his every step. The way he said his name lingered between his shoulderblades, pushing him forward, even as it called him back. 


	2. the iron bull

Night. Malika on watch on the roof of the ruin, sketching in a notebook. Vivienne sat with Dorian across the fire, a careful eye on him. 

Bull turned over, pretended to sleep. 

His mind drifted again to home, to his tama and the officers inside the hut. The black scepter on the table. The silent offer. Given because he had a good reflex for bending the wild over his knee. Sure. He’d seen a creature, known its worth, and known it had to be put down for the sake of everybody else. Same with everything that had run at him with a sword or a claw since then. Soldiers. Bandits. The dragon. They needed to be— _smoothed over, the wrinkles in what needs to live—_ he shut it out of his mind, doors closed, every threshold in his body locked to the outside, to the inside, to himself. Wherever it came from, it would have to fucking knock. 

It did nothing to alleviate the fist of nerves in his stomach. Nothing to convince him to take a few winks before sunrise. Bravado did nothing but steel the balls. But at least there was that. 

He wondered what they would think of him now, all those stern-faced Qunari, offering him the whole world: lying by himself in the desert, too shit-scared to sleep because of the demon lying in wait. Even if it didn’t come tonight, there was always tomorrow. Tame the wild. Yeah. 

It had touched him. 

Touched him, and his body had—he didn’t know. Didn’t know if it had done what Bull wanted, or what the demon wanted, or if it acted only as it knew how. On instinct, like a skittish animal. He couldn’t stomach a single option. All the strings were being tugged by someone else, something else. 

It had touched him, and he’d—he’d let it. Until the last moment, when he found himself running like a scared kid, trying to scrabble his way out of a nightmare. The thought gnawed. A bad shiver caught him—he’d been cold all day, and all night, but now it surprised him in spasms, like rubbing up against one of those ice sculptures at the Winter Palace. There’d been one taller than he was, a model of the courtyard and the gardens done in perfect carving. Felt like he was being stuffed around the curve of the fountain, the world’s ugliest frozen Qunari swan. 

The thought almost made him laugh. Almost distracted him, and then his brain trained on the day again, on what had happened, and eroded away whatever else he felt in favor of blister-cold shakes and the bile washing up in his throat. 

At least he had lived. He couldn’t give himself any credit for the doing—it had been by the hair on his ass at best. But he was here. Whole enough to walk on his own, still. 

Dorian and Vivienne were too quiet. Thoughtful. Vivienne and Malika hadn’t got far in the ruins below. The newest door took some kind of puzzle involving a cipher and a great deal of skeletons when something went awry. Bull had offered to go down with them next time—his brain needed a distraction to gnaw on. But then Malika’s eyes darted to the cavern down, and Bull remembered how he wouldn’t fit. 

They roasted an august ram over the fire, fat dripping down and sizzling in the pit. Old and lean, a grandfather who’d seen better days. Fur worn nearly grey, instead of the night-blue of its brethren. Malika had become quite the competent skinner since the first days of the Inquisition. A natural for traps for beast and soldier alike, the hunting knife was only the next step, and Bull appreciated how most days they didn’t eat half-rotten vegetables dug out of the sand, or gamey desert hares. 

Bull volunteered the last watch before the sun rose, so he hunkered down to sleep soon after. Far from the fire, so they’d think the cold had passed him by. (It hadn’t; since the afternoon, it sunk its teeth into its chest and decided it liked the taste, and every breath was heavy as a block from an ice chest.) 

Dorian and Vivienne sat close to the coals. He studied their backs intently from afar, as though to make meaning out of the folds of their clothes. 

“Ice,” muttered Dorian. It didn’t take much to hear him either way. “ _Ice_ , of all things, for that brainless, headstrong--” 

“Oh, darling.” Vivienne’s voice cut him curtly in two. “Have you made a study of the human mind as well as the human dead?” 

The sound of hands brushing over leather, and a particular, indignant silence. “It’s not conventional,” he said, finally. “His magic. Whatever it is.” 

“Old,” Vivienne said, and closed her eyes. A soft furrow etched itself between her eyebrows. “What touches him is old.” 

Dorian settled forward, examining the leather in his belt. “But I can’t believe he could walk around carrying magic as old as civilization in his bones and not know it.” 

“Then you understand what it is.” 

A long pause. “You’re not insinuating it’s the _dragon._ ” 

“When you eliminate all thats possible….” she began. 

He groaned, pressing a hand to his eyes. “We have no idea,” he said. “It could be an impossible amount of—of—possibilities.” 

Vivienne clucked her tongue. “The benefit of mastering your magic according to rules and law, as opposed to your whim.” He could hear her nails tapping against her staff. “A certain logic usually presents itself. Magic can’t just disappear.” 

“But it returns to the Fade,” Dorian protested. “It doesn’t—drift into another being.” 

Vivienne smoothed the front of her robe. A pause. “It goes where it’s called.” She touched the tip of her finger to her lips. “He ought to be a smoldering patch of nothing. Liquid fire. I’ve never seen it before. Not even your Tevene mages could manage that.” 

“We have something like it,” said Dorian automatically, which meant, in translation, _not really._

“They say the ancestors of the Qunari have dragon blood,” she continued. “Perhaps kin recognized kin. Or something like it.” 

He snorted. “And what, Madame Vivienne? Made a gift of it, like an old coat?” 

The stillness was so quiet Bull could feel it in his teeth. “It did what it had to do to survive,” she said, finally. “It changed.” 

He heard Dorian exhale, slowly. “It’s not possession,” he said. “I’d be able to tell.” 

The word made Bull’s heart leap into his throat before Vivienne made a quiet noise. “No. The dragon is long dead. Perhaps it—sensed potential.” 

“You truly think it’s that simple?” Dorian’s voice, not bothering to hush the astonishment. And a note of—truth. Acceptance. 

Vivienne huffed one dry laugh. “Nothing is simple,” she said.

“A piece of the answer,” Dorian agreed. He made a thoughtful sound. “Magic can’t just disappear. All that energy—it has to _go_ somewhere.” A pause. “Everyone but dwarves are connected to the Fade, even if it’s just in sleep.” 

“A perfect alignment of elements.” She sounded intrigued by the thought. “A kinsman, naturally connected to the Fade, just as he was dying.” 

“And they were—physically connected,” he said. “Through magic itself.” 

“The fire.” 

Dorian leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Yes,” he said, eyes alight. “Yes. He was nowhere near perishing. Didn’t even have a scratch on him, far as I could see. It simply—poured over him.” 

“Water,” Vivienne said, “from one cup to another.” 

They spoke of it the way old seamen chatted about storms on the horizon—with a casualness Bull could only hear with a hollow disbelief. 

A space in the conversation, as Dorian gathered his words. “There is a problem,” he said, just as delicately. “He can’t be taught.” 

“I doubt that.” 

“Then you make an attempt.” The sound of tools being put away. “I don’t see why I have to watch the child.” 

Vivienne went on without indulging him. “The protections on this ruin are incredible. Each door is sealed by a magical lock only opened with the right alchemical mixture of herbs found in the temple. To fail ignites an inferno that engulfs the room.” She turned her head to watch him wrap his little tools back up in a cloth. “Would you like to try your hand at it, knowing the life of our Inquisitor hangs in the balance?” 

“Just—just give him _something_ ,” Dorian protested. “He respects you and your words far more. How else did you get him to let go of the door?” 

“I didn’t,” Vivienne said, and the words made his heart stop. “He chose.” 

“Choice is not a tool Bull can use.” Dorian’s voice, flat and blunt as a cudgel. “Not any more than I can pick up a sword and defend myself with it. I’m more liable to cut my friends to pieces than make a mark on an enemy.” When Vivienne said nothing, he went on, voice rising in irritation. “You ought to stay with Bull while Malika and I go under, or scout for Venatori, or—something.” 

Vivienne said calmly, “She’s made her choice, and she wants me below. Not you.” 

“I’m not a teacher,” Dorian said, and the pride in his voice prickled. He didn’t want to admit it, just as he didn’t want it at all. “You are. Grand Enchanter. Head of Montsimmard. A hundred apprentices, probably, whole and through the Circle. Surely you know the way to Bull’s potential.” He sighed. “I’m not suited.” 

Dorian was running through his cards too quickly, Bull thought. Not a teacher, not our mission, not the stinking Qunari (since he couldn’t be assed to know the difference between it and Tal-Vashoth, even though he ought to know better than anybody else). And he knew it. The careful line of his shoulders sagged infinitesimally. 

After a moment’s pause, Vivienne said, “I think it must be you.” 

“But _why?_ ” Dorian railed, and—it came perilously close to a whine, but it changed, turned at the last moment. He bristled with real anger, real frustration. It made the edges of his voice chip and crack, like the edges of parchment against flame. Bull secreted the tell away, as though he would gaze at it later, examine it like a stone. “He doesn’t want to learn. It’s centuries of ignorance to undo, and I can’t, and he can’t. He’s Qunari and it’s magic—he looks at his own shadow like it’s going to rear back and freeze him toe to scalp.” 

Bull kept his muscles still. Wasn’t fucking true. Exaggeration at its finest. 

Dorian fell silent, then, without his anger. It filled the space around the camp, tracing its way towards an answer. When he found it, he exhaled slowly. 

“You don’t want him to hate you,” said Dorian, with all the certainty in the world. 

Vivienne didn’t answer. 

“Bull can’t stand magic.” He said each word delicately and without spite, as though it would imbue it with truth. “He will resent whoever leads him to change. Someone must be sacrificed, and that person won’t be you.” A pause. “Or your friendship, and that’s not—it’s unfair.” 

Bull liked Vivienne, yeah, probably more than anybody else they kicked around with in the name of the Inquisition. She had the same kind of vigilance about her, a wary look in her eyes he could match iris to iris. Nothing escaped her notice. She used magic efficiently, never wasting an ounce of mana more than she needed to complete a task. 

She had insisted the Inquisitor bring him to Halamshiral, despite the national Orlesian distaste for Qunari, and together they had spent two weeks planning at Leliana’s behest. Ways out, ways in, the secret passageways, how to protect the Inquisitor. Vivienne had predicted the servants’ quarters and the back courtyards as key points for Corypheus’ forces to gather—she had been right at each turn, and the Inquisition hadn’t lost a single soul. 

Not because of Malika’s speechifying. Not because of Bull’s axe. But because Vivienne knew more than most of them put together, and the Inquisition wasn’t afraid to listen to what she had to say. 

“Are you done?” asked Vivienne, and Dorian choked on his waterskin. 

She folded her hands in her lap. “Most magic requires structure, order, control. It falls into patterns and rules as kin to us as the lines on our hands. It is an answer, for why we can see glimpses of the future in the mirror, or start fires without tinder, or call down storms when we feel petulant.” The last two were far too pointed to be anything but barbs. “They require reins, strength of will, a hardened heart to indulgence.” 

“Exactly,” he breathed, tinged with relief, and Bull almost scoffed—he thought she agreed with him. He knew the way she liked to win an argument, though, which to never shy away from the use of friendly fire. 

“Bull’s magic will never follow those lines,” she said, and then he realized—he’d been agreeing with her too. Cold made knots of his stomach.

He could hear Dorian shut his mouth with a click of his teeth. “He must,” he said. “There’s no other way.” 

“It’s old,” she repeated, gentler now, as though with a dull child. “Think of it operating in a different language. You and I come from opposite ends of Thedas and we still hold the same principles. Magic is a tool, and to give in to it spells destruction.” What they each used those tools for went unsaid, but Bull knew that was where the path starkly split. 

But it didn’t matter. His heart pounded so loudly he could barely hear them across the fire. All he could hear was, _it can’t be controlled, it can’t be controlled, it can’t._

“My rigidity, my methods,” Vivienne said, with calm evaluation, “they will not serve him. Can you understand this? The paths set out long ago by Circle mages cannot contain Bull, if his magic aligns with what we discussed.” 

Dorian snorted. “You can improvise, can’t you?” he asked. “The most brilliant mage in two countries. Can’t you?” 

“We do not have time,” she began, in a tone so serious it sent chills up his spine, “to teach Bull how to master a magic we cannot understand. Disaster will befall us long before we ever get there.”

A pause, drawn out worse than any blade sliding over the skin. The thought of hurt, of disaster—it writhed under his skin like a spooked animal. Then Dorian cleared his throat, and finally broke the silence. “Then what can we do?” 

“Follow his magic,” suggested Vivienne. “You cannot command Bull, or whatever lies inside him. Magic in Tevinter revolves around instinct, artistry, your _feelings.”_ The barely hidden derision cut through his own fear, if just for a moment. “He must learn to listen.” 

Dorian said nothing. Bull could sense dumbfoundedness gathering around him like a dark cloud. But he didn’t protest. A long silence fell once more. 

“And Bull,” Vivienne said, and for a minute his chest tightened—was she talking to him? But the pause that followed was only to gather thoughts. “Bull is a man of complete control. In every version, in every scope. A life devoted to purpose, to sorting his existence into rules to govern the heart and the mind. There is not a moment when he does not understand precisely what every inch of his body does, or how it moves, or why.”

He held his breath. 

“Ice,” she continued succinctly, thoughtfully, perhaps with a finger pressed to her chin, “requires precision. No sloppiness, or it shatters. No rush, or it thins and melts. It demands perfection. You don’t throw it about, or bring the universe to its knees, crying for your mercy. No. You consider the world, the terrain, the task required of you and just how you fit within the landscape.” 

She raised her hand a little into the air, as though imagining white flakes around her fingers. “And then you paint.” 

~~~

Bull didn’t sleep. He tried, so it wasn’t a worthless exercise for Vivienne to stay up and watch him for the first half of the night. But every time his lid shut for too long, he felt the long, spindly hand on his chest, carving into him, digging around. Seeing what was inside. And he’d jerk awake, snorting air hard through his nose. 

So he watched the sun rise while Malika and the rest slept under the white eaves of their canvas tent. Nothing special—oranges and pinks, unbroken by a mountain line. They ate breakfast together, dried fruit and stringy gristle from the ram. Vivienne reached out, a dried fig in her hand. Bull took it silently between two fingers. It prickled, sent a little shiver up his arm to his spine. They hadn’t touched. But the spark jumped like a gnat, from her hand to his. 

His hand jerked. Vivienne took note of the movement, but that was all. 

“What’s under there?” he asked before popping the fig in his mouth. It made his teeth hurt, it was so sweet. 

Vivienne rested her chin in her hand. She looked tired—his fault. “She’s not quite sure,” she said. “Only that it must be discovered, and quickly.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Dorian find his way over to Malika, kneel down next to her as she dug through her pack. Couldn’t read either of their lips, with their backs turned. 

“You’ve got a thought or two, I bet,” said Bull. 

She raised an eyebrow. “She thinks a dwarf was buried here.” 

Bull eyed the structure. The stout walls, hardy build, runes carved into the threshold, the thick-lined faces guarding the entrance—yeah, a tomb, obviously. “You don’t agree?” 

“With only one distinction.” She smoothed her coat. The ends pooled at her feet. “A dwarf was buried here _once._ ” 

He raised his eyebrows. 

“Dwarves wouldn’t trap their tombs with magic,” she continued. “It’s guarded to the teeth with tripwires, spikes, pits every which way—but the doors. The puzzles are dwarven. The consequences are sorcery.” 

“So someone else is buried here,” he said, rubbing his chin. He eyed the tomb. 

“Perhaps.” Vivienne shrugged. “Or we are merely visitors knocking at the door.” 

The thought made his stomach twist, and Malika walked back into view. “You ready?” she asked Vivienne, shouldering her pack. She nodded wordlessly and stood, her coat rustling against the sand. They disappeared inside the door without any preamble—Malika knelt down, fixed a wire, and then turned down the stairs. Bull watched until the backs of their heads vanished from view. 

And then it was just him, and Dorian, standing by the doused fire. He cleared his throat. Bull said nothing. 

“We’re walking two miles east,” he said. “Bring your waterskin.” 

Bull didn’t move a muscle. “Too far. Who’s watching camp?” 

“She set a trap.” He gestured to the threshold of the door. “They’ll be fine.”

He snorted derisively. “Malika thinks--” 

Dorian didn’t let him finish. “This is more important,” he said, and didn’t bother softening the edges of his words. “She agrees. Move, Bull, or sit and wait for a scolding.” He turned on his heel and walked away. 

He watched him walk, just as he had the day before, not a shit given about whether or not he followed. Bull collected his waterskin, his axe, and tromped east through the sand after him. Nothing else to do. 

They had marched all of fifteen minutes before Bull cleared his throat and asked, “Where we headed?” 

Surprise, then, in Dorian’s spine. He craned his head over his shoulder. “You don’t recognize it?” he asked, voice curious. 

It made his throat tighten. “Nah.”

“I suppose you were--” Dorian made a gesture in the air, a little flutter of his fingers, “--rightfully distracted.” Instead of giving him the answer, he only shrugged and said, “You’ll remember.” 

No more words were exchanged between them for the rest of the walk, sweat pouring down Bull’s back in the sun. They rounded a craggy outcropping of rocks, hiked up a high sand dune, and then--

“Oh,” Bull said. “Shit.” 

The dragon’s heavy carcass rotted in the sun beneath them. It looked smaller than it should, cast onto its side as though it had been toppled over by the massive hand of some annoyed deity. Head at a crooked angle, jaw lopped open. Closed eyes. Bull wondered if Malika had climbed up the head and shut them herself. Out of respect. 

Only a couple days had passed. The real stink wouldn’t cloud the nostrils till you were up close and personal. Dorian began the careful walk down the dune, sand sliding around his boots. Bull stood at the top, didn’t move. 

He watched the corpse, how empty it was, and tried to remember how beautiful he found it when it arched out of the ground, writhed into the sky. How the pit fell out of his stomach when it took flight, the churning of his own heart—not in panic, not in fear, but excitement. The taste of adrenaline in his mouth. 

He looked at the body, remembered how badly he wanted to cut his teeth on it, and a knot undid itself in his chest. It let go, like a barge bearing a dead body on a river, sailing somewhere else, far from here. 

The fear lingered. It always would. But a heavier weight clinked into place—a mouthful of nothing, swallowed whole. Despair. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. 

It hadn’t made itself plain until he saw the pile of bones and scales, the whiskers still poking out from its snout. Panic was immediate, a distraction. He’d spent so much time knee-deep in the kind of shit-your-smalls fear he’d only dreamed of till now, he’d forgotten---

No fixing it. No fighting it. No bargain to swindle his way out of it. Nothing was the same. It would never be again. Bull gave up fear like a drunkard swore off drink, sitting in the back of a tavern, fumbling a mug of ale until it splashed all over his hand. Standing in the middle of the trap. Knowing the ache wouldn’t leave, he’d just—make a bigger space for it. Find a way to breathe without sucking it down like water. 

“Bull.” Dorian, at the base of the dune, staring up at him. He didn’t know how long he’d been watching him. His face was thoughtful. Bull didn’t know what to make of it. “Come. It’s alright.” 

“Yeah, I got it.” His voice came out rougher than he wanted. He stopped himself from cringing at the attempt at comfort—he didn’t need anybody to gentle him—and padded down to follow Dorian to the corpse. 

They walked up close to it before Dorian paused in the wake, squinted. “I should--” he began and then started over. “Vivienne and I spoke yesterday, and I think--” 

“I heard,” Bull said. No point in sitting on it. 

He blinked. He opened his mouth once, then shut it, and turned back to the beast. “Well,” he said. He imagined it was the closest he’d ever see Dorian to _embarrassed._ He’d spent years learning to hide it, probably. ‘Vints smelled shame and fear on their tongues, like snakes did. But here in the desert, there wasn’t much point. 

“Thought that kind of crap only happened in books,” Bull said. “Sounds like something Varric would make up if he was too drunk to sit upright.” 

It broke the tension a little. “Quite,” agreed Dorian. “One of the rubbish ones he does for _art’s sake._ ” 

The quip would’ve cracked a grin on Bull’s face in any other circumstance. But he cocked his head, surveyed the dragon nose to tail. 

“So it’s—me,” he said dully. Like dirty water and a sponge. 

Dorian shrugged. “A hypothesis at best, Bull.” 

He wanted to ask, the words trembling on the tip of his tongue, _it’s not_ in _me, right, ‘Vint? You would know, right? Vivienne would know?_

“It doesn’t look right,” he said instead, furrowing his brow. 

“What do you mean?” 

He thumbed at his chin. “Even if frost dragons liked migrating to the desert, they don’t look like that. All golden and whiskered.” 

“You don’t think it’s just older than what we know?” Dorian inquired. 

“Sure, could be.” Capital-o _Old._ “But.” 

“I might be wrong,” Dorian answered with a wave of his hand. He was all stubborn pride, until it came to figuring out a puzzle, and in the face of discovery, it just—melted away. “I’m not an expert in magical beasts by any means, but—I don’t think it should be here.” 

“The stuff it did,” Bull said. He made a gesture to his mouth—the smooth quicksilver fire, puddling into vicious spines in the sand. “Not natural. Even for a dragon.” 

Dorian didn’t say anything, but narrowed his eyes and took a few steps forward towards the corpse. Dorian had some magic around dead things, he knew, but he didn’t know how it worked. Never bothered to ask. 

He braced himself, ready for the pull of the spell. But nothing came. Dorian only skirted his fingertips along one of its heavy claws, the skin of its massive foot. Sharp intake of breath. 

“What?” Bull said. 

Dorian twisted his head over his shoulder. “It’s _cold_ ,” he said, voice brushed with curiosity. 

He stood there, blinked. 

“Come see for yourself,” said Dorian, and gestured. “No harm.” 

Bull didn’t move. 

“It won’t hurt you,” he said. 

“I’m good.” 

After a moment, Dorian turned from the dragon, stood to face Bull in the sun, head cocked. Dorian liked to make a play at reading people even when he couldn’t. Bull knew that look. 

“Bull.” He cleared his throat. “Yesterday, something happened. While you were—focusing.” 

The rounded attempt not to call it _meditating_ was almost amusing, but Bull’s jaw clenched so hard he thought it would split the skin over his chin. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, instantly, a reflex just as quick as drawing his axe. 

“Oh?” Dorian rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Shall I fetch someone else?” 

“You’re not great at this,” said Bull. 

He raised his eyebrow. 

“At wanting to be here,” he elaborated. “It’s not your thing.” 

“i’m not a teacher.” He could hear Dorian trying to temper his voice. “I never claimed to be. But I’m making an attempt, no matter how half-assed. It’s more than I can say for you.” 

“Why the fuck are we here?” Bull asked, point-blank, voice shod of all feeling. 

“To get a hard look at what life is now.” Dorian’s voice, taut. Bull dumped emotion when it started to run too hot; Dorian’s voice flooded with it. “I don’t know. To make an attempt at moving forward, instead of crawling inside yourself and bare-knuckling your way through.” 

More silence. 

Dorian sighed once, short and sharp. He turned away from Bull, took a few steps down the corpse, examining. His shoulders, set in their marble-perfect line—Bull braced himself for an ultimatum, a command given in a withering tone he had no intention of following. 

“Talk to someone,” Dorian said, and they were the last words Bull expected out of his mouth. “If I don’t suit, then—find who you need.” He touched the nape of his neck idly, as though he could feel Bull’s eyes on him, light as an idle breeze. “Vivienne. Even Malika will serve. But mages don’t last long by themselves.” 

The statement hovered in the air between them. 

“There’s a reason,” Dorian said, “we live in towers, or Circles, or in a country unto ourselves—among family, old and new.” Dalish, Bull thought, perfectly tucked into the ranks of the Chargers. “It doesn’t work alone. You’re brushing up against the whole universe, you know. All the things we can’t understand. If you think you can eat it whole and survive—well. I suppose your gullet can handle diamond. Be my guest.” 

And that was all. He didn’t go on. It rumbled around in Bull’s head. Like when Malika had looked him in the eye and told him she knew how to take him down. It gave him a second to breathe. Jostled the gears. 

Wasn’t till now, hours and hours away from when it happened, that he realized how badly he wanted to open his mouth about it. Should have done it with Vivienne, this morning. But thought of the tiredness gathering around her eyes, the long day she would spend under the earth, far from the sun, trying to make sure Malika didn’t trip into anything too deadly, had stopped the want long before it ever reached his mouth. He couldn’t. More burdens after guarding his sleep. Wasn’t fair. 

It swam together—the words rattling at his teeth, his promise an hour before on top of the sand dune, the husk of the dragon their only witness. And then he opened his mouth. 

“I think I hit the Fade,” he said. 

Dorian stopped in his tracks. An inhale, an exhale. The soft sound of his boot heel turning in the sand. Always careful. “You did?” 

“’Don’t go inward,’” Bull repeated. “That’s what you said. I don’t know what I did. But it felt—deep.” 

“It happens,” he said simply, and took a step to breach the distance. “Something took notice, I imagine.” 

He grunted.

Dorian waited, with the kind of patience Bull expected from women old enough to be his mother, and not ‘Vints. If it annoyed him, he couldn’t tell. He just watched Bull’s face, carefully as a looking-glass. 

“The Fade’s a drainpipe,” he finally said, “more or less. No matter how you found yourself connected to it. That’s where it comes from. The gems.” He touched his own throat, right at the bob. “The—whatever that was.” He tapped his chest idly, thoughtfully. “Everyone attracts attention.” 

The word made Bull glance up. 

“ _Everyone_ ,” Dorian repeated, right on cue, as though pulled by an invisible string. “Did you think...” He trailed off. 

Bull shrugged, found his eye on the dragon. “I only know,” he said, “what I’ve picked up from Dalish, or Vivienne.” 

“It doesn’t matter how good I am,” Dorian told him. “Demons will come knocking till I die. No matter how good I am at telling them to fuck off. It’s the same with everyone. Vivienne, too,” he added as an afterthought.

“It’s--”

“Everyone.” He repeated the word, not understanding why it held Bull so fast and tight in its grasp, but only that it worked. “It’s the arse-end of a deal we all share. Solas. Us. You. All your mages in chains. Apostates all over the bloody south.” He huffed a laugh. “For better or worse.” 

Like an elbow to the stomach. 

He read the sentiment under the words, clear as daylight. Not alone. And not meant to be. 

When he found his voice, it rasped like tumbleweeds and day-old ale. “When they—visit you, what...” 

Dorian turned then, neatly, to the dragon’s corpse, and it occurred to Bull he was tugging at sensitive intel. The type of shit you played close to the chest and only told people in darkness, black and forgiving. Ink covering clean parchment. 

“Shit,” he said. “I--” 

“It’s difficult to explain,” Dorian began, all in a rush, tripping over himself in unintended interruption. Bull bit his tongue. Waited. There were things that couldn’t be paused, once they started. 

“Lots of demons writhing around the Fade,” he said, regaining his matter-of-fact nature. A tell, Bull thought. Pulling back on what he felt. “A certain breed of them are named Desire.” 

Bull snorted, unable to help himself. Dorian’s head jerked—he watched him realize he was amused at the name, and not the tale, and settled a little. “Sorry,” he said. “ _Desire._ Know that one.” 

The attempt at humor softened the tightness in Dorian’s spine. “Indeed,” he conceded. “A popular visitor.” 

“Let me guess,” Bull said, leaning into it, “a ten course meal, with everything you never knew you wanted.” 

Dorian scoffed a little. “So plain, Iron Bull. How expected of you. I suppose _the little pleasures_ don’t have much of a place in Par Vollen.” 

“Maybe I can’t imagine what a ‘Vint could possibly want,” he said, letting it sting a little. “Is there shit in this world _not_ carried to you on bended knee?” 

“You’d be surprised.” His laugh was more of a bark than anything else. “There’s a reason it’s a demon.” 

He crossed his arms. “Uh-huh. Silk for miles, featherbeds, a loom that can spin straw into gold.” 

“Oh, Bull.” Dorian sounded so disappointed it yanked him out of the game, a pull on his stomach. “If only.” 

He waited, then, letting the wind fill the silence. 

“It promises to give me exactly what I need.” Dorian kept his eyes on the corpse, idle searching. 

He remembered—the blissful feeling, just for a second, when the demon spread its hand over his flesh. Gave him a taste of madness, possession—whatever it was called. The way his throat closed on it. How possible it seemed, just for a second, to slide back into how shit used to be. Or better. How it felt like—peace. 

He got it. How they knew want you longed for, like reading a hand of cards over your shoulder. Rippling through your mind like a drunk strumming a lute. Even now, the idea made him sick, set his belly aching. 

He didn’t know how to say it. But he—he got it. 

There’d been a silence, long enough to stir Dorian. “Besides,” he said, straightening his shoulders, adjusting one of the buckles draping his arm, “we’ve had that loom for _ages._ ” 

Bull snorted. The corner of Dorian’s mouth curved up. Small, not quite a smirk. Real as sunlight, and cut just as swift. 

And then it was gone, and Bull was still looking. 

“What did it promise you?” Dorian asked, voice dropped into seriousness. 

He shrugged and looked back at the dragon. The battered shell. Remembered the demon tickling around his brain, and swallowed. 

“I don’t know,” Bull said. “A way out.” He swallowed again. “Through a way in.” 

Dorian blinked. “Oh,” he said. “It makes sense.” 

The assured way he said it made Bull blanch. “What?” he asked, terse. 

“Freedom from fear,” said Dorian, as though it were obvious. “The thing you hate most, showing up at your doorstep and offering you a—life without it.” 

“I’m not afraid of them,” Bull said instantly, a brandished shield. “You don’t see me running off when they get in my face out here.” 

He expected another sigh, the disappointment that lingered like the cold under his skin. Biding its time to realign and reappear. Instead—

“They’re not after your bravado. Bull,” Dorian asked, turning his head. Stone-grey eyes traced him, fingers on a rune. He almost shivered under the weight of their sincerity. “what do you need?” 

No power against it. Talking would—it’d build a bridge he couldn’t go back over. Acceptance. Of this shitty fate and whatever it had in store. It meant—knowing he wasn’t by himself, tangled up in his own knots. It meant, shit. Making something. That’s what happened, when you knew you shared a burden. The whole Qun was built on it. It made you one. Made you whole. Made you something, instead of nothing. 

Bull looked back to the dragon, slumped and dead and empty. Empty of everything that found a home in him now. In his throat. In his hands. He looked at them, saw ways inside, and thought—fuck it. 

Dorian had noticed. “Bull,” he said again, crossed between curious and wary. 

“To be me,” he said said, slowly, “and nobody fucking else.” 

_I’m not afraid_ , he told himself, gritted teeth and all. He reached forward, heart pounding, and laid his hand on the giant hide. Didn’t think twice about it. 

The smell of metal and rock flooded his nostrils, swamping his lungs. Bull tipped back, in his own memory, like a tin cup brushed off a table. The thought hooked its claws into his windpipe and dragged down, and it wasn’t anger pulling at his breath, but—

Par Vollen loved its stoneworks more than any nation loved its gold, or gems, or dogs. Stone served under the hand shaping it. Stone knew its place. Stone resisted the unstoppable fist of the sea, and never faltered. It only changed. 

He remembered his tama, and their incessant history lessons. Qunari didn’t follow a god, but history was the closest thing to a prophet after Qun and the Great Ashkaari. _It tells the future, imekari_ , she’d tell him as they rounded a statue of the first Sten, one of Bull’s favorites. The Sten stood, knee bent, ready to leap forward into the fray. His sword didn’t rest at his side, but sprouted from his arm. The Sten did not need a hand to eat or drink, only his sword to bring kabethari to their knees. (Bull could still taste the disappointment of learning coming of age did not mean growing metal from his joint-sockets.) 

_Why?_ he’d asked. 

_Stone cracks,_ she told him. _The wind and sea will always win. But the statue resists. That is the heart of the Qun. It will never stop fighting change, and never stop being changed by what touches it._ She paused, looking up at where the tip of Sten’s sword breached the sky. It was no longer sharp and keen, but dulled by centuries. 

She had an ugly face, Bull knew now. Lost most of her nose in her early days, when the ‘Vints burned down a school she worked in on the coast. But Bull had said, _like you_ , and she had smiled. 

The war greater than anything they fought on land or sea. _The statue resists,_ thought Bull, and something burst. 

He opened his eyes when he heard Dorian gasp. He didn’t stare into Bull’s face, but at his boots. “Bull,” he said, and the name slipped out of his mouth, full of awe, soft as cotton. 

He didn’t speak—he vibrated, with that thought, the mountain of granite holding its own against the inevitable sea. A chill reverberated to his bones, as though his skin had been peeled away by nails of frost. 

Dorian took a step towards him, fingers splayed. “Don’t--” he began, and then stopped himself. 

“What’s happening?” asked Bull, and his voice only trembled a little. 

“You’re alright,” he answered, the cocky confidence all but disappeared. Turned into certainty, like ash into gold. “You’re alright, Bull.” 

He asked again, _what’s happening_? _,_ or maybe just thought it, the words banging up against the sides of his skull. And Dorian said, a gentle push, “Look down.” 

_The statue resists_ , thought Bull, and his ears filled with the sound of scales buckling together over his skin. He looked down at his hands and they were covered in raw diamond, thick with the deep silver-blue of a briny sea. 

He recognized the tuneless music of the cold, the not-quite-ice and the not-quite-stone linking fingers across his flesh. It spread up his arms, coated his shoulders, covered the slopes of his chest and his back. _The statue resists._ It gathered at his clavicles, and rolled up across his thick neck. Slipped under his eye-patch. 

Dorian’s eyes followed the tide as it crawled across his skin, gaze unblinking. “Bull,” he said once, urgently. But Bull nodded, and Dorian waited, and he could see the breath, held tight in his throat, the anxious precision in his eyes as the rock rolled up the cleft of his chin, the long slat of his jaw, his ears, his scalp, his horns. 

Then it was over, and he stood there. 

“Can you see me?” asked Dorian. “Can you breathe?” 

“Yeah,” Bull said, his breath slow and aching at his teeth. “I—yeah.” 

He tried to lift his arms—whatever held him was heavy, thicker than chainmail or plate and twice as hard to function in. He could barely move. For a moment, the thought threatened to pull him into panic. But he took a breath instead, and let it wind its way into his belly. 

Dorian took a step closer, and then another. His eyes wandered over Bull, but with none of the clinical interest he expected. Half-worry, yes, and the surprise of discovery. But nothing cold. Nothing cruel and ready to pull apart Bull apart, piece by piece, to make note of what lay underneath. 

Concern, sure, Bull could understand. But the faint gleam in his eyes, unmistakeably, was wonder. The difference between wonder and ambition was reverence. And it was the last thing Bull understood how to handle. 

He was close, now, nearly touching, but stopped just short. He glanced up at Bull, finding his eye through the diamond and said, “If I could—might I?” 

Bull nodded once, and felt the scales creak at the joint of his neck. 

Dorian’s hand dropped to the crook of his thick elbow, and he rapped with his bare knuckles. It made a faint metallic sound, and Bull snorted, despite himself.

“You didn’t even feel that, did you? You’re worse off than an anvil,” said Dorian conversationally, a smile curving at the corner of his mouth. “All those barbs, perhaps, about the thickness of skulls from Par Vollen.” 

“Implies they had effect,” said Bull. “Your tongue needs work.” He caught the way Dorian’s eyes rolled, and huffed a single laugh. 

He pressed his thumb to the groove where one scale met another. it sent a shudder up Bull’s arm, all the way to his spine. The touch was warm. It penetrated through everything, right through the bone, like the ember of a just-lit match. 

“Octahedral,” he mused aloud. “And--” He pulled his hand away, shaking it gently before just placing the very tips of his fingers against Bull’s arm, “--cold as a witch’s tit.” 

“Yeah?” The pads of his fingertips tickled, like the brush of a feather. 

“At the ruin, you froze yourself to the stone.” He squinted at Bull’s skin. “This is--” 

“What came out of me,” he finished. “Whatever that was.” 

“Rough diamond,” Dorian supplied, “or near it, so far as I can tell. It did this with its claws, do you remember? The color was a little different, but the material...” He examined the texture of the scales with his fingers, and Bull flinched. 

Dorian stilled. “You can feel that?” he asked. 

“Yes,” managed Bull, and swallowed. “It’s just warm.” 

Dorian nodded, as though he knew anything. “You’re not so--” he began, and then stopped. Bull managed to move one of his fingers at the knuckle, as if to say, _out with it._ It took all the effort of his arm. “I thought it would rattle you,” he said, earnestly enough no shame prickled at the nape of Bull’s neck. “You’re calm.” 

It wasn’t like before. The ruin, snatching it out of him. The vision he’d had the day before, licking at the shell of his ear and whispering behind his eyes, the demon caterwauling—

“It feels like me,” Bull said. 

Fingers, long and brown in the mid-afternoon sun, hesitated for the span of a breath, the tips balancing on the inside of his arm. The touch was fleeting and soft beneath all the armor. A brush of warmth. And then Dorian raised his hand, and pressed two of his fingers against Bull’s neck. 

And then Bull could feel blood pumping in his ears, and Dorian’s eyes widened as he touched the steady beat of his pulse. They could both hear it, clear as music, and stood there, frozen to the spot. Full of wonder. 

“It is you,” said Dorian, and his thumb balanced itself on the cliff of Bull’s jaw. 

Far, in the distance—a massive _boom_ shook the ground. 

Dorian whirled around quick—it took Bull an agonizing handful of seconds just to turn his head. In the distance, black smoke billowed up in the air, curling towards the sky. 

The tomb. The camp. 

Every nerve in Bull lit up, trained on the danger beyond them—stupid, stupid, got distracted with Dorian, with the magic, stopped making sure nothing was getting the jump on them--but before he could move, before he could slough his axe from his back and make a run for it—the armor, fuck--

Bull tried to move, but there was nothing quick about the armor holding him solid. Didn’t account for joints, by the feel of the knee. “Go,” he grunted under his breath. “Go. I’ll follow.” 

Dorian turned back, away from the smoke. “Call it down,” he said. “You can. I’m not leaving you here alone.” 

“No time,” said Bull, rasping through the gems. 

“Then call it down so we can both go.” His voice was firm, absent of panic. 

_Fuck_ , thought Bull, and searched. 

“It’s a muscle,” muttered Dorian. “You’ve used it before. You know what it does.” 

“I don’t,” Bull said, before he could stop himself. 

Dorian set his shoulders, didn’t pull away. Bull didn’t need to see his face to know the stubborn look permanently etched there. Instead, he stepped forward, and the toe of his boot brushed up against Bull’s toe. The flush of snow-melt washed over his skin. 

“Focus,” said Dorian quietly. “We can’t move until you do.” 

Bull stared at the crown of his head, and then made himself close his eyes, and thought of the tide. 

Thought stopped. Time pulled away, whirled to some other end of the universe. Bull made his mind swing, back and forth, to the sea’s metronome. It was far from here, and hard to conjure, but it was a little like a heartbeat, and a little like breath. It began at his wrists, first—the damp falling away. It wasn’t a thaw—the cold stayed snug against his bones—but the weight lifted, slow and steady. 

Tuneless music, unwinding in his chest, unwinding the armor grown tight to his skin. A loom, spinning backwards. _The tide rises,_ whispered that toneless cold in the back of his mind, the same that had lingered in his head a week before, nesting. _The tide falls,_ he thought, pushing back, and the scales fell away. 

“Come on,” Dorian said. His eyes drifted to the carcass of the dragon, just for a moment. Bull followed. 

All that was left were—bones in the sand. The wind whistled through them on its way south, and they ran. 

~~~

By the time they reached the tomb, the smoke had blown out. The poles of the tent had blown over, the linen canopy puddled on the ground. 

Dorian, meters ahead, showed no sign of slowing as he reached the threshold of the door, until Bull barked out, “ _Hold._ ” 

He skittered to a stop, nearly losing his balance in the sand. Bull caught up with him, legs on fire. “The trip wire,” he panted, kneeling. 

“Can you--” 

Bull followed the line, unwound it from the trigger. His shoulder brushed up against the stone of the ruin; it sent shivers over his skin, even a little sheen of crystal up his arm. But that was all. The line fell slack. 

“Go,” Bull said, but Dorian had already pitched himself down the stairs and into the darkness. Then all was quiet. 

He stood there, staring down the stairwell, and listened, heart pounding against his chest. The minutes dragged on until there was the scrape of an opening door, the shuffle of too many boots in a little space. Malika’s face first, hard and wan, Vivienne’s hands on her shoulders, Dorian lighting the path behind them, worry etched into his brow. 

Bull saw what had happened the second they hit daylight—Malika’s hands, burned so badly from tip to elbow the fingers seemed permanently curled in on themselves. Lumps of clay. Vivienne didn’t even have to open her mouth for him to get himself back to their stuff, to dig for her pack and all the poultices inside. 

Malika said nothing, made no sound. Her whole face was wracked with concentration against the pain. 

He and Dorian pulled the tent back into place, the linen dipping in the evening wind, as Vivienne carefully cut away dead flesh, rubbed wet packets of herbs into her skin, and cast spell after spell. Malika said nothing during the process, as tough-cut for wounds as any soldier. Then they stood off, waiting for when Vivienne would motion one of them in for something—more water, or bandages. 

The smell was something else. Seared flesh, and the acrid smell of Vivienne’s little bottles and bandages, and the—feel of her magic, as it ran over Malika’s skin, her wounds raw and open and red. 

He didn’t know how long he stood there, watching. He’d never seen it before. _Saarebas_ didn’t heal—they were essentially trebuchets. Dalish didn’t heal, and the Chargers didn’t take on mages much. Once or twice someone had been in a bad spot, and a mage was made available—if they were working for a noble with the means to get someone from a Circle there in time, before the war—but it happened behind closed doors. Bull never watched. 

“It’s hard to do,” Dorian said, breaking him out of his reverie. He didn’t even know how long he’d been standing there at his side, watching. Both of them, waiting for direction, more than a little helpless. 

Bull gave a half-nod. 

“They cultivate it here, in the south. They think healing is harmless, and so they like their mages to do it.” He liked to fill empty spaces with words, but Bull was listening. “Not a ‘Vint thing, as it were.” 

He grunted. Not a Qunari thing either. “Wonder why that is,” he wondered aloud, and then answered his own question. “We’re at war.” 

“Precisely.” Dorian rubbed at his jaw with a thumb. His face soured with worry. “More people to set the world on fire. How glorious.” 

He said it with an unexpected bitterness. Bull eyed him in the periphery, but Dorian didn’t elaborate. 

Vivienne bent her head, raised her hands once more. Soft, violet light poured from her hands like water. He could feel it all the way over here—a prickle in the air before a thunderstorm. Even the air grew damp with humidity. The scorched flesh odor was cut in two by how clean the air smelled, vinegar and copper. He suppressed a shiver. 

It looked so simple. Bull couldn’t get over it. Qunari didn’t put stake in miracles, only sweat and blood and the work of your hands—what you could do. How fast you could do it. But these were Vivienne’s hands, working to the bone, all her effort and what she had spent her whole life learning how to do. What she was meant to do. 

It wasn’t— _saarebas_ sacrificed. Revered by the Qun as much as the Qunari were wary of them, for bowing their heads to the fight making war of their entire bodies, every day, every night, every fucking breath. For blinding their eyes and sewing their lips shut. Bound until their skin chafed with scars. Cursed, blighted, feared. And striving, always, to remain untouched by corruption. Service under the Qun. 

“Dorian,” said Vivienne. “A moment, if you would.” She gestured him over and he went immediately, knelt at her side. They murmured a few words between them—Vivienne, giving direction, and Dorian agreeing. The movements of their lips were too quick and small to determine what. 

The air changed. Dorian touched Malika’s elbow, his hand lingering on Vivienne’s shoulder. A last push. The smell of dryness and dust on the ground, just before it rained. He filled his lungs with it. Familiar. Good. It scored his lungs clean. 

The soft violet light traveled over Malika’s wounds again, tinged with a rusty ocher. Desert warm. It dipped beneath the skin, and all three of them inhaled on a tight breath. 

Oh. Lending strength. More hands lifting the beam. He said he couldn’t do it, but he could—help. 

The flesh of her arms rippled. 

Bull watched them so closely he forgot where he stood. Even after all his years out of Par Vollen, marching with the Chargers, slinging his axe alongside Vivienne in the service of the Inquisition, watching fire curl around Dorian’s hands as they waited for the order to sprint forward—he’d always figured it was borne. Shouldered because it had to be. No choice. 

Wasn’t it the same as learning how to wield a pike and a shield, or memorizing all the words of the Great Ashkaari to interpret the will of the Qun, or teaching little Qunari shits how to grow up in the world? All those things were foretold too, roles your body was made to hold. The thought clotted his brain like a foul bleed. Nobody would say so. Not even his tama, who could squint at the world and saw how everything was connected with spider-silk, one thing to the next. 

They were mages. They didn’t waste time hiding it, a burden shuffled under a heavy cloak. A tear needed fixing, so they mended. Got out the proper tools. No shame, no wrenching power out of them in the name of greater good, no chains at their throats. Just—harm, rectified. 

The light pulsed in brief, quiet rhythm. Malika made a soft noise, the first sound to escape her lips since they pried her out of the tomb itself. Barely a whimper, but fresh with pain and strangeness. 

Dorian squeezed her arm, holding her still, and murmured a word under his breath. _Nearly there._ Vivienne flicked her fingers, every tendon in her rigid with focus.Another wave of light, deep violet, rimmed with the color of sunset, slid over her hands. Malika’s fingers, seared together by heat, parted. The raw wounds vibrated, and new flesh—scar tissue, dark and thick—wove patchy seams across her limbs. It happened in time, now—heartbeats. Bull could feel it, all the way on the other side of the camp. The clockwork of their efforts. A pulse, as vibrant as the one pounding in his neck. 

The effort of saving her hands. The miracle they quietly enacted, without show or spectacle. 

_You’re meant for this_ , thought Bull. It was the only way he could put it. The words glimmered in him, bright enough to touch, to hide under his tongue. 

~~~

Later, they huddled around the fire, Malika bandaged to the teeth but still with all her fingers, and with dexterity good enough to make notes in her journal about what happened. Vivienne sat, nibbling at her rations. Bull brought her a blanket, made tea out of the last bitter leaves at the bottom of Malika’s pack. He plucked the metal pot out of the coals without thinking. Even as the water steamed out of it, it was nothing in his hand. 

“Trapped door,” Malika told them grimly. “We had figured it out. All the right minerals, all in the correct order, but when I turned the door--” She slid her hands forward in demonstration, as though she had put her arms to the elbows inside a set of gears, “--my hands got stuck, and then something went off.” 

“It exploded,” Bull said. “Magic?” 

“Yeah.” Malika rubbed the spot between her eyebrows with a thumb. “Boom. It all flooded with smoke. And then—fire.” 

“Like a curtain,” added Vivienne, nestled in her spot. She tapped the rim of her cup, deep in thought. “Volcanic. It eroded the door.” 

Something about that struck Bull, but he couldn’t place why, or how. 

“We didn’t get it wrong,” she went on. “It’s just—the next obstacle. The next puzzle to understand on the way in.” 

“The question is _from who._ ” Malika’s voice was grim. “Not a dwarf. I’ll tell you that.” 

And that was all they said about it. The day had chewed them up and spit them out. Malika finished her notes, pausing every once in a while to flex her hands, before ducking down for shut-eye. Vivienne curled up in her bedroll, asleep as soon as her head touched the ground. Dorian was awake, paging through a tome. Switching shifts, and tonight’s watcher. 

Bull rolled onto his back, watching stars through the gauze-thin linen of their canopy. He linked his hands together and pressed them into his belly. The episode today had made the chill worse than ever before, and it took effort not to shiver. 

Across the tent, Dorian looked up from the tome he was scratching in and considered him for a moment. Bull looked back up at the stars. 

A voice, then. Quiet. “Are you cold?” 

He didn’t answer. That much was obvious. 

It didn’t deter him. “I can help you again, like before. If you want.” 

The memory of the first day flooded his senses—the choking, the pain, the heat blossoming through his throat. The snow-melt. The swallow.

Bull opened his eye, rolled onto his side. Didn’t say anything. 

“I’m only asking,” said Dorian. “Say no.”

A long, long moment. Bull looked into his eyes—searching for hints of guile. Wanting to find whatever would make him refuse. Nothing lay there but an earnest offer of comfort. 

And, fuck, Bull was freezing. 

“Alright,” he said, and Dorian laid down beside him, near an arm’s length away. He reached across the space. Bull lifted his head a little, and Dorian tucked his hands around the tendons of his neck. 

Why he chose there—because of what happened before, maybe. But warmth plumed beneath those fingertips, the soft ache of stepping into a hot spring. His muscles went lax; his ears rang with it. His head tilted down till his horn caught the ground. 

“Do you know,” Dorian said, his voice careful and soft, “I’m not doing anything.” 

Bull raised an eyebrow. 

“I’m not,” he said. “You’re—whatever’s in you is pulling the mana out of me, or reacting to it.”

Bull said, “Vivienne’s hands feel prickly.” 

“Perhaps you’re more sensitive to what touches you, now.” Dorian pursed his lips a little. “If that’s even possible.” 

“More aware,” Bull attempted. “Sweeter way to put it.” 

“Not my inclination.” But the chastisement more amused than anything else. Dorian slid one of his hands to Bull’s nape. “Lie back,” he said. “You look ripe for a broken neck in that position.” 

Bull obeyed, rocking onto his back and settling his head back into the sand. Dorian’s hand squeezed a little on instinct, but then relaxed. His other hand slid until it rested on the apple of his throat. Gingerly. Waiting for permission. 

“You’re good,” Bull said. He could feel his voice reverberating through Dorian’s fingers. Dorian went absolutely still for a moment, so still Bull thought he would pull away. But he didn’t. Bull didn’t know how he could tell, but he could feel Dorian’s muscles relax, starting with the tips of his fingers, reaching his wrists, his arms, his shoulders, until his whole body exhaled. 

The relief of the quiet pooled in his stomach. 

“This a healing thing?” he finally asked, more of a grunt than a sentence. 

“Hm? No.” Dorian’s voice was fuzzy—content, and Bull regretted saying anything at all. “It’s just me.” 

“Fire. Heat. That’s you.” 

Dorian said, “I can do the others without a problem,” and managed a little shrug of his shoulder. “I prefer fire.” 

Bull stared up at the stars, the wide gaze of the moon. “Leaves an impression.” 

“Fire and death usually do,” Dorian chuckled dryly. A wisp of snow-white air escaped the corner of his mouth. The cold becoming a touch, skirting along his lips before it found freedom. 

_Me_ , Bull thought for one blinding moment, before putting the thought away deep below his skin. 

“Are you cold?” he asked suddenly, making a move to push himself out of reach. 

“Not at all,” Dorian answered, then furrowed his brow. “Not like you are, anyway.” He was silent for a long moment, before his mouth opened again. “It lingers in you.” 

“It doesn’t linger,” said Bull before he could stop himself. “It never leaves.” 

Dorian looked perturbed at the words. “You didn’t mention that.” 

Bull shrugged a little. “What was I supposed to say?” 

Dorian’s fingers tensed on his skin. Just for a moment. “You surprise me,” he said, finally. 

Bull arched an eyebrow. “What’s that mean?” 

“You’re not acting the way a Qunari would act, being a mage.” Dorian said, “I thought—I’d have to stop you from sewing your own mouth shut, or tossing yourself off a bluff.” 

No sound, then, but a desert cricket feeling his oats. 

“You’d try to exact the magic out of yourself,” Dorian continued, but quieter now. “You’d ask Malika to take your hands. Something like that.” He worried at his lower lip. 

“And what am I acting like now?” Bull asked. The sound of his own voice felt foreign coming out of his mouth. 

“You’re so—you’re so _still_.” He dropped his gaze to the sand beyond them, brow wrinkled as he gathered his thoughts. “You’re not trying to learn how to do it,” he went on, “but you’re not trying to end it, either, and instead you’re stuck.” 

Bull thought back to the table, his tama, the Qunari watching him. The obsidian scepter. He hadn’t done anything then either. Just left.

“I’m not saying you didn’t do well today,” Dorian said. “Or that it wasn’t progress, only--” 

Bull licked his lips, mouth dry. “Only what?” 

“You do it with such grief.” Dorian’s voice went soft. It was all he said. 

It made the tendons on his neck tighten. He fixed his eyes on the pointed glow of the stars. The arch of Dorian’s palm resting against the bob of his throat. 

“You really don’t get it?” he asked, tight with frustration. He felt his voice vibrate through Dorian’s hands. “Why this is a little fucking _tough_ for me to wrap my brain around?” 

“Every _‘Vint_ child knows the story of the Qunari carrying the dreadnought out of the storm,” Dorian said tartly. That was—an old tama’s tale about the war. ‘Vints, trying to catch the Qun’s fiercest dreadnought ten miles from the shore, bottled a hurricane and let it loose from the skies. Instead of letting it get trapped in the winds, every crewmember dropped into the sea, ropes bound to their backs, and swam back to shore. Hauling the dreadnought behind. 

If he hadn’t had his hands so gently clasped to Bull’s neck, he’d be making one of his dramatic, frustrated gestures in the air. “When disaster comes, you just— _make do_.”

“’Vints,” Bull grunted, barely a breath after Dorian had finished. “’Vints and magic. It’s the answer to everything. You get it, and the world opens. You’ve been in the south for years—you don’t see how it’s not like that for everybody else?” 

“Of course I do,” Dorian said. “And nobody’s sitting on their magic till it roasts them alive. Even with the templars running them from the desert to Denerim.” His nose wrinkled. “I’m a mage. I see it. I know it myself. What do you think the rabble think when they see me waltz into the Emprise? They ready their fire and pitchforks like everyone else.” 

“Then you should _get_ it.” Bull didn’t know how to say it. “It ruins shit, Dorian.” The words were clumsy on his tongue. “It paints a target on your back the size of Sundermount. And on top of that, if you take your eye off it for a second, it goes unchecked. And people get hurt. People die. You die. It all unravels, and there’s no going back. Just like you said. Right?”

Dorian’s brow furrowed, but Bull didn’t give him a chance to talk. “You’re in a country that doesn’t like you—great. Deal with it. I already lumber around the south like a rolling trebuchet, and now I--” He took a breath. “It’s different. I gotta figure it out. You lived with this all your life. Whatever you think you gave up doesn’t hold a candle.” 

A long pause, before Dorian spoke. It dulled the tension. He glanced down at the ground—weighing his words, weighing Bull against them. 

“I burned my father’s hand, once.” Dorian’s voice was quiet. Bull blinked. It was not half what he expected. “He left on some item of business for a whole two months when I was ten. Might as well have been two centuries, for all I understood time. I ran away, twice, to find him, much to my nursemaid’s chagrin. But he returned.” Then he stopped talking. 

“Sure,” Bull said, to push him on, because anything was better than lying silent. 

“We don’t, ah—embrace, as a habit.” He fingered his chin. “But he reached out for me, and I grabbed one of his hands in both of mine. I was so excited to see him, and then he screamed.” 

Quiet, then. 

“I melted his rings right off his fingers,” Dorian said. “He was fine. Hardly rated as a magical catastrophe. Best alchemists in the land, all that. Right as rain.” He raised one of his hands from Bull’s neck—he felt the warm recede a little, as though the sun had turned away behind a cloud. Flexed his fingers. 

Bull had taken stock of his hands before—they gave a pretty clear picture of work, and how long someone had done it, and what kind of weight they felt comfortable handling. Dorian took care of his hands. But they were broader than he expected, strong from years of twirling that staff around. Wide and fine. He remembered the tiny motions they made, repairing leather, working a needle. And fire, too—when Dorian balanced it in battle, he cupped flames in his hand like a chalice of wine. Bull realized that depending on the tilt of his wrist, he knew whether Dorian handled a flame or a pen, or the weight of his waterskin. 

Bull wondered, blearily, when he’d cataloged each angle, and how he knew it by rote. 

Dorian cleared his throat. “My fingertips scarred him,” he said, touching the little valleys between each fingers. “Here, here, here. He took to wearing gloves. My fault.” 

“You were a kid,” Bull said. 

“Indeed.” He slid his hands back to Bull’s neck, and Bull closed his eye for a moment as the heat washed over him. “He never bore me anger for it. He told my mentor it was a small price to pay to see talent shine so brightly.” 

Bull didn’t understand why that turned his stomach, but it did. Everything he expected of Tevinter, maybe, in a sentence. He stared at him, for a moment—the dark trim of his hair, the curve of his ear. He pressed his mind to the task. But for all Bull’s certainty on ‘Vints, no matter how he pushed, he couldn’t imagine Dorian—hurting, reaving, burning flesh. Not without recourse or cause. 

“I know,” said Dorian, slowly. He cleared his throat. “What magic takes. The price of it. What it ruins.” 

Something in the steady hush of his voice indicated Dorian knew exactly what magic could curdle and rend. He hadn’t forgotten the risk, the knife it always had at his throat, depending on where he was, or who. It was just normal enough that carrying it felt like nothing. Like when his axe was strapped securely on his back. Not easy. Just—weight. 

Bull could tell, as obvious as smelling smoke from the fire. _Fuck._ He’d cocked it up. 

Dorian cleared his throat. “Your life. How you traipse about this idiotic world. What you love.” He paused. “The way you looked at the dragon today,” he said, tinged with the clear light of realization. “I’ve never seen you look that way before.” 

And then he was quiet, and the silence made Bull ache. 

“It’s just part of it,” he said, quietly. 

“Yes,” said Dorian. “I’ve always lived with it, and I can’t change it, so there’s no point in dwelling. I forget—it takes time to accommodate the weight of the scale.” 

“I get it,” said Bull, and then he went quiet too. 

After awhile, he said, “When I—did the thing today. And the explosion happened. You should’ve gone.” 

He watched Dorian blink out of the corner of his eye, watched his grey eyes roll. He huffed. “Bull,” he began, with the painstaking efficacy of a professional martyr, “ 

A pause, before Bull grunted. “Should’ve done _something._ ” 

“I’m assuming that’s confusion.” Dorian narrowed his gaze. “You’re a blustering whirlwind, you know that? Senile, too. I’m trying to do as you say.” 

It was the heat, Bull decided, the relief that had made his mind melt somewhere else. The heat eased into his bones, a thick blanket reminding him how little he slept, how heavy the weight of the past week had made itself on his shoulders. 

“But it was—a crisis,” Bull said. Even as the pieces unfolded in front of his eyes, he did not believe it. He had seen it—or not seen it, in evidence. 

He stared at Dorian, and Dorian met his eyes for only a moment before he cast them down. Self-conscious at bringing it up at all. Not wanting Bull to notice. But why? 

“Come off it,” he said. His thumb swiped against the skin of his throat—soothing, almost, or brushing aside. It made Bull’s spine go tense. 

Bull said, “You didn’t use magic on me,” and he couldn’t recognize his own voice. “You didn’t--” 

He didn’t have the right language for it. Pulled the armor off him with a wiggle of his fingers, a press of the supernatural. Made Bull himself again. He could do it—or try. 

The smoke, spiraling up from the tomb. Their Inquisitor, in danger. Bull, unable to move. The pieces aligned. There was no reason for Dorian to adhere to Bull’s request. No reason at all. 

“No,” Dorian finally said, voice quiet and curled in on itself. “No time to ask.” 

Bull didn’t know what to say. He looked back up at the stars, and listened to the sound of Dorian steadying himself with a carefully measured breath. 

“And I knew you could call it down,” he said finally. 

When Bull spoke, it was only a mutter. “How?” A worthy question. Never done it before, not without coddling and cajoling and all the time in the world. The way the afternoon might have played out unraveled wildly behind his eye: panic pulling his skin taut, and the two of them, too late to do any good at all. 

“You don’t falter.” Dorian’s voice parted his thoughts like a river. His fingers no longer merely rested against Bull’s throat, but cupped the shape as though carrying something delicate. Bull’s fingers pushed into the sand beside him. “Not when it matters. Even if you’re facing a dragon. Even if you’re only standing still. You don’t give a shit about the impossible. It presses and you don’t crumble. You only...” He trailed off, piecing through his words. 

Bull swallowed once, mouth dry as parchment. 

“Adaptation,” Dorian said, finally, coming to the end of the proof. His hand rose, pressed a fingertip to Bull’s temple. A flare, soft as a match-stick. “Always changing, even when I can’t see it.” 

~~~ 

That night, Bull dreamed. 

Not like when he _focused_ , traveling down to take a piss on the center of the universe. Just—a dream. 

A black coal sat in his palm. Barely a pebble. The air smelled of charcoal. Huh. And then it wiggled. 

Bull blinked. 

It flared red and orange, the black heart disintegrating in a flash, and dived deep into his skin, burrowing under the flesh. The slice of it against his muscle made his jaw drop, the twisting pain as it bore through muscle and bone and back up, wild and free—he lost all his breath, free hand clenching into the the dirt. He couldn’t do shit—couldn’t call the armor up, even if he tried—everything was scattered—wouldn’t do good, besides, it was armor, all it’d do was trap it inside—it screeched up his arm, knocking around inside his shoulder. The pain made white lights streak across his vision. Prickled at his brain. Lightning. Vivienne. But she wasn’t here. 

The coal slung itself into his chest with the speed of a whip, skating across his ribs in gleeful free for all. A low noise escaped his throat, and it careened upward, hot and hotter, a tongue of flame-- 

_Not real_ , said the voice of the cold, the one hiding in his belly. _Tighten up, Hissrad. Think._

It gave him a breath. 

Not hot. Coals didn’t hurt him anymore. He’d rolled over the fire the first morning. Not what warmth felt like now. That was gone, maybe forever, and for the first time, Bull didn’t mourn the loss. 

The coal sang up into his throat—Bull swore he could feel it pushing under the skin, zigzagging back and forth, before it popped into the cage of his throat. He swallowed, and felt ice instead, the cold whirling that liked to settle there, stalactites of silver. 

_Eat shit,_ thought Bull, and woke up.

He sat straight up. Dorian, reading near the fire, jerked his head. “Bull?” 

Bull rammed his chest with a closed fist. He coughed, once, and a raw diamond tumbled out into his hand. The pain faded. 

“I’m good,” he said, and laid back down. 

His fingers brushed over his arm, his chest. Nothing there but old skin, scarred and grey. An illusion, he thought, and he knew it. Took everything he had not to grin like a fucking idiot. 

~~~ 

An uneventful two days passed. Malika and Vivienne stayed above ground, recovering. Vivienne didn’t need the time to heal after a good night’s sleep, but it was—polite. Respectful to wait. Bull expected her to let Dorian take a break, or at least come along on their excursions, but she never did. Not even to supervise, or for her own curiosity. He was sure she nursed a little, at least, but she didn’t badger Bull, and didn’t critique Dorian. This, too, was a type of respect. 

Or she was saving herself the headache. Dorian didn’t waste any time going on about rules, or bending him to other tasks. Never told him to do anything he’d seen the two of them do, which was a—pretty long list. No barriers, no lifting, no fire at his fingertips or lightning. It wasn’t a lack of structure, really, just practice. (Vivienne had called it a different language. So, maybe he’d learned to say _hello_ , and Dorian decided to make him practice the word over and over until his teeth fell out, or he murmured it in his sleep.) Endless repetition. 

Made sense. A drill, more or less. What hadn’t he learned that way before? 

One trick. He could do one trick without shitting his pants. _That thing I do_ , Bull called it. _Your armor_ , Dorian corrected gently, a little touch of majesty in his voice, which either made Bull snort or give a churlish grin. 

The two days followed the same rhythm, and then poured into a third. They traveled out, Dorian kept watch, and Bull called the spell, held it on his skin, and dropped it. Over and over. A drill. They took the two days to make it good—to measure speed, for the most part. (“Let’s see how quickly you can get it up,” Dorian had said, and then smacked Bull on the arm with an open hand for his grin. Getting it to come down, of course, took awhile.) 

They wandered home at night, Bull just as tired as if he’d spent the whole day prying stumps out of the mud. 

He ate whatever was pushed in front of him—boiled grain with chunks of ram, prickle pears and jerky, charred lizard. Then rolled into a big grey lump by the fire, back turned to the flame. He huddled in on himself. But he felt asleep quick, with no dreams to speak of. 

He mentioned it to Dorian, who said that was a way they used to ward off demons, when they didn’t know much about them. Wear yourself out so you don’t dream. Eventually his body would get better about it, and it wouldn’t work so well anymore. But for now—he could deal. Just that, and the cold. Dorian offered once more, when he caught Bull shivering, to put his hands to better use. 

Bull said no. Didn’t mind the cold so much after all. 

(It had left him a little raw, last time. Woke up all pliable muscle, body too soothed by the sensation of what it didn’t carry anymore. Wouldn’t do him any good to get used to it. To need it, when he couldn’t make it himself.) 

It was all livable, more or less. No new thorns in his ass. 

Except Malika. 

Malika, who usually would be pestering them about frying up a pan of desert crickets just for the experience, who would certainly sit at Bull’s side and interrogate him about his lessons with Dorian, who would protest and beg to head back into the ruins before she was anywhere near ready, was quiet. 

Of all the ways she could be—silent. 

Unfocused. When Malika fell silent, she accomplished tasks, stirred everyone around her to productivity But she spent hours writing in her journal, her mouth drawn in a hard line. Looking out at the horizon. Staring at the threshold of the tomb. She took off one morning before Bull woke up, and insisted on going alone. Neither of the mages knew where she went. But she returned with a sour face, and no words for anybody. Not even Vivienne, her constant confidante in the name of discovery. 

Not lost in her thoughts. Not working towards a goal. Stewing. Plain and simple. 

Never a good sign. Malika wasn’t meant to be idle for long, and three days pushed it too far. 

When the sun hung low in the sky on the third day, Bull finished calling off the armor. He brushed the last of the stony scales off his arm where they melted away before he knew what he was doing. As though they were snowflakes. Dust from the road. A couple of hungry gnats. Nothing new. 

Dorian saw it. If he hadn’t, Bull was sure he never would have brought up the question. 

“Do you think,” Dorian said, “we ought to show the Inquisitor what you can do? And Vivienne. Just—so they know. If you’re ready,” he added, tapping his chin thoughtfully. 

Bull asked. “You’re saying I can refuse?” 

Dorian shrugged. “You choose.” 

He hesitated. He didn’t care if Vivienne knew. Malika wasn’t herself, but maybe it would bring her out of it. He hadn’t thought of hiding it from them. Not much of a point. 

So he conceded, with a little nod of his head. 

It was a mistake. 

Their little group ate a brace of plump desert hares around the fire, and when he’d picked the last of the meat from the bone, Dorian made the suggestion. Malika shrugged and said, “By all means.”

Vivienne looked pleasantly surprised, and smiled a little with her eyes. The first since they’d pulled Malika out of the ruin. _Worth it_ , Bull decided as he rumbled to his feet. He called the armor, let it lay heavy on his skin, and let it go. It took time—only a few moments for the diamond to come forth, but a quarter of an hour for the scales to drip away. Vivienne watched him carefully, curious. Not so different than any other time he’d caught her eyes on him. But she was exacting with her looks. 

“How interesting,” she said, and the wonder was genuine. He could tell that far. He watched her eye Dorian when he wasn’t looking. 

That wasn’t the tooth of the problem. It was—Malika. 

He should’ve known. Distracted as he was, he didn’t think how she’d take it. Hadn’t thought about how she dealt with new bits of information strung across her path, forgot she split open a tree to find a dragon’s whisker, forgot she grabbed the diamonds out of the pile even before he’d stopped choking them out. 

So Bull called it up, let his eye wander, and saw her stare. And everything changed. 

She had eyes on him like a hawk, and a handful of seconds after he called it up she was groping for her notes and quill. Wrote without even looking at the page. She drew him so quick she broke a pen nib, and had to scramble for another. He half-expected an examination under her gemcutter’s glass, but after she opened her book of notes he was the only object of her focus. 

Not fear, not derision, not panic. But no awe, either. Not the quiet, curious wonder he’d gotten from Dorian, either. 

No questions. No words. Nothing. Just lightning through her hands, notes fanning out over the page in the kind of haste that might rip the parchment down the center. 

A cold and unbearable interest. 

He brought it down after a little while, all his skin tingling in relief. She watched just as close. He couldn’t look at her anymore. The exacting knife of her gaze felt too much like a scalpel under his skin, trying to dig up what couldn’t be held, or touched, or weighed.

But Dorian watched her. 

He saw it out of the corner of his eye, shifted his periphery. Dorian watched each of her movements with a practiced look of patient disinterest. But he’d seen Dorian examine him long enough to know nothing went unnoticed. His brow furrowed, a few thin lines creased his forehead. He watched those hands scrawl notes, draw him in thick lines of ink. Shifted his weight to the foot nearest Bull, probably without realizing it. 

Better to mark this. He wiped the cold dribbling over his face, flicked it to the ground. It broke the moment, and Dorian turned his attention to him once more. “Quite satisfactory,” he said, but Bull didn’t have the heart for the laugh. He hunkered down by the fire instead, sharpening his axe, and the camp fell into silence. 

Didn’t take long for it to pan out. An hour later, Malika came and sat at his side, opened the book, and dropped it in his lap. 

Her precision with the pen nib unveiled him better than a reflection. He didn’t know what he looked like with it on—hadn’t thought much about it, but what was sketched on the page was unrecognizable. He could distinguish horns. That was all he saw of himself. A figure sculpted from molten rock by the sloppy hand of one god or another. 

He had no face, with the armor. A thick plane of scales, sharply angled on each side. 

He stared at it, and the nothing stared back at him. 

“Look accurate enough?” Malika finally asked, after enough silence. “Thought I’d send it ahead to Skyhold, with a few of those stones you coughed up. It’ll make Dagna’s entire year.” 

She had made notes along the planes of his arms and legs. _Spell completes within tree minutes, takes longer to dissipate—five at least. Same material as sample. Test for hardiness, elemental resistance—seems a sure bet to ward off fire._ Measurements. _Thick here—joint, old injury_ at his knee. _Compensating?_ Along his forearms— _seems thinner here, penetrable by c.bow bolt or other. More study to see if it replicates itself each time necessary. Consistency doubtful._

Weaknesses, diagrammed in full. How to put him together. How to take him apart. 

Bull couldn’t look at the page anymore, and shut the book with two fingers. “You’re the boss,” he said. 

“Good,” she said, and dusted off her hands. “How do you feel about going under?” 

He cocked his head. Across the fire, he saw both Dorian and Vivienne raise their heads a little from whatever they were doing. Vivienne was mixing herbs in a glass bottle. He could smell dried elfroot leaves, lazurite powder, water. Prickle pear flesh. She had grown fond of the scent since they’d started traveling through the Wastes. 

“Going under?” he repeated. 

“Into the tomb.” She nodded over her shoulder at the ruin. 

Bull opened and closed his mouth. “Uh,” he began, with a sideways look across the fire. 

Malika snapped her fingers once, like an impatient child. “Bull,” she said. “The tomb. Think you could do it?”

He cocked his head at her, too slow to catch up to wherever her brain was burning.

She sighed. “You’re it.” She said it with the kind of energy zealots had after kneeling at an altar too long, but with a certainty that knotted his stomach. 

_It._ What the fuck did that mean? 

He didn’t have time to voice the complaint before Vivienne raised up her head from her work. “Inquisitor,” she said, “the tomb is pointless. An archaeological wonder, to be sure, but it can’t be worth anymore time.” 

“Or flesh,” added Dorian, a mutter just loud enough to wander across the fire. 

Malika scooted to her feet, dusting sand from her breeches. “Nope,” she said, with a kind of cheer she learned from Dagna. A new tactic. Some people always thought bad news landed easier in a happy tone. It didn’t. “Please. You’re clever enough to see it.” 

Dorian put down his tome, brow knitting together. “Inquisitor--” 

“The dragon,” Malika went on brusquely, a wave of her hand. “I suppose you were all too busy fighting it to—well.” She scratched the back of her head. “It did just what Bull did. Don’t you remember?” 

She flipped open her journal, bandaged fingers catching on the edge of the pages. Bull watched them. Every flip made his heart pound faster, and he didn’t—there wasn’t a reason for it, for the way it gathered in his throat and threatened to close off his wind pipe. 

Except—when she found it, and said, “The claws. Dorian cast, and it called a new layer of scales.” 

“Against my fire,” Dorian said, peering at her. 

“That—what did you call it—armor? The same thing. The very same.” She snapped the book shut for finality, even though he was sure she’d fling it open again in less than a minute. Her eyes darted to Vivienne. “Tell me I’m wrong.” 

“Similar,” Vivienne began, but Malika barreled on before she could finish. 

“The liquid fire in its mouth,” she said. “Molten-slow, like the lava rivers in Orzammar but—sleeker. Almost like hot silver. You remember?” 

“Of course we do,” Dorian said, not bothering to shave the irritability out of his voice. “It nearly killed three of us.” 

Malika leaned forward. “The door in the ruin,” she said. “Big explosion, and then fire came down it, like a curtain. A waterfall. _Same thing._ ” 

Vivienne opened her mouth, but Bull interrupted, unable to help himself. “Same color?” he asked, mouth dry. 

“Well,” Malika admitted, “it was too dark to tell.” 

He immediately regretted asking the question. The way she had sunk her teeth into the opportunity wasn’t right; he couldn’t get wound up in her—passion wasn’t the right word. Her energy. It was too tempting. She sounded like she was right on the brink of a cliff, convinced that teetering off it would let her fall into the right answers. 

Of course, she didn’t let that deter her. “With all that smoke, I couldn’t—it doesn’t matter. The texture was the same. That was the main thing.” 

Dorian tucked his legs under him, tome long since tossed to the side. “So what?” he asked, in a tone Bull had never heard him use with her before. Harder than his usual petulance. 

It stilled her, but the wrong way. She went all cold on the inside, and even if he couldn’t see where it was going, Bull’s heart started thumping. “Look, Boss--” he started. 

She turned three-quarters to stare at Dorian across the fire. “So what?” she repeated. “ _So what?_ ” 

“Should I say it again?” Dorian asked, and Vivienne reached across to squeeze his elbow. 

Malika rubbed her face with her bandaged palms. “The dragon dropped a whole mouthful of that stuff on Bull, right? Straight on. Direct hit.” 

They waited for her to finish. She weighed her heavy gaze against Bull, a spiked mace tapping against his chest. “He didn’t die. It’s the same stuff.” 

“No,” said Dorian, and he rose to his feet. 

“And he’s the same Bull.” She went on, raising her voice a little. “A better Bull, even. Remember that armor on the dragon? Nothing we cast could get through it. _Nothing._ And he’s got his own version.” 

“Inquisitor.” Vivienne’s voice, serious as the grave. “You can’t be suggesting--” 

Malika cleared her throat like a queen, and pointed at Bull with one small finger. “He can get us through the fire,” she said simply. “I know it. He’s the key.” 

Silence. Bull stared at her. His brain buzzed like a fly between his ears, narrowing in on one point. She’d found a use for him. Another little tool inside her leather bag. 

There was a second thought, too, worming its way inside. A side of him curious enough to open his ears to her. As fucking ludicrous as it sounded. The certainty in her voice, like unbreakable stone. _The key._ Keys filled spaces, interrupted confusion. They cracked doors. They—opened answers. 

“He can’t even get inside the temple,” said Dorian blankly, bringing him out of his spiral. 

“We’ll break the stone, make it wider.” Malika waved her hand. “Vivienne offered, when we first found it, but I thought he wouldn’t need to come in.” 

The thought made his skin go tight. Shit being kept from him. Just like before—being marched through the desert between Vivienne and Dorian, like a bottle of acid that might pop at any second. He ground his back teeth. 

Vivienne smoothed her robe. “It would take us both,” she said. “Or days for me to do it alone.” 

Dorian’s nose wrinkled. “Even if he could do what you asked,” he said, “what would be the point?” 

“Don’t you see it?” snapped Malika, furious only with their slowness. “It’s all practically holding hands. Why was that dragon out there? Why is Bull doing magic? The claws, and his armor, and the liquid fire—it’s all so damn close, if you’d just open your eyes.” 

“Inquisitor,” said Vivienne, a one-word reprimand. 

She deflated, but not enough to make a difference. “That dragon’s not supposed to be here,” she said. “Frost dragons don’t live in the desert, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be plated in diamond, spewing quicksilver fire. It’s _wrong._ ” And then she turned to the ruin, flinging a bandaged arm in its direction. “An old dwarven tomb should be ransacked and empty, not trapped to the last inch with magical disasters. None it makes any damn sense. There’s an answer. I know it. Someone was in there, doing something they shouldn’t, and we need to know why.” 

Despite the churning in his belly, Bull found himself—agreeing. Take the magic out of it, and it was a plan he might throw his weight behind. It was here, waiting, and they had a way through. Or an idea. It was more than they’d operated on before. Why not elbow their way in and see what was inside? 

It shook him. Like the first hiccup of an avalanche. He had forgotten, the past handful of days, to keep asking _why._ To sink his teeth into the meat of why the fuck this was happening and shake it until a solution fell out. 

The thought of it flooded him. Answers didn’t buckle. They were good as stone, and lasted just as long, if they were the right ones. With the possibility dangling in front of him, he couldn’t push it aside. Couldn’t call it down, like the armor. It took to him like a fat leech hungry for blood. Spaces, filled with something. _Anything._ Confusion and emptiness. Never learned how to do it. Now he didn’t have to. 

“Inquisitor.” Now Dorian was on his feet. “You want to use him as a _battering ram_ ,” he snapped. 

“He doesn’t have to move,” said Malika. “He just has to stand there long enough for us to pass under. That armor will hold up against the fire. We’ve seen it done.” 

“Ah, even better.” continued Dorian. “A doorstop. He’s been doing magic for all of a week, and this is your idea of a plan?” 

“His point is sound,” said Vivienne firmly. “That’s more than I would ask of any apprentice. He needs time.” 

“We don’t have time.” Malika crossed her arms, continuing to pace. 

“The risk to Bull is unconscionable.” Vivienne folded her hands in her lap. The cold tinging her voice felt immovable, solid. Bull wanted to lean into it. But--

Malika laughed, a genuine disbelief threaded with resentment “We were ready to plow right through the tomb without a single idea of what lay at the end. Hours of time, and effort, and—skin.” She stuck out her hands, as though they’d forgotten. “Now it’s got a point, and you want to go home.” 

“It’s not worth the risk.” Dorian, brittle with cold. 

“It’s worth _everything,”_ Malika said, just as cutting. “All of this. Everything that’s happened since that dragon popped out of the sand, and you’re telling me we can go without figuring out why? Don’t you want to know?” She turned to Bull. “Don’t _you?_ ” 

They all looked at him. “Bull,” Dorian began, “think about--” 

It was enough. The avalanche tipped, tumbling down until instinct piled up behind his teeth, and his tongue couldn’t hold it back any longer. Not a great idea. He knew it. They all knew it. But it was so fucking close to what he needed. And here it was, the last chance. 

It tumbled out. “Yeah,” Bull said, and he couldn’t remember the last time his voice sounded this sure inside the desert. “Yeah. I do.” 

Malika exhaled. “Good,” she said. 

A stale pause. 

Dorian’s voice. “You need us both?” he asked, voice blank. 

Vivienne nodded. 

“I won’t do it,” he said. 

The words lingered in the air for the span of a breath, and then he turned and walked off into the night. 

The effect was just subtle enough they all stood there for a heartbeat, staring at the empty space he left as though he might reappear out of the shadow like one of the ghosts he conjured from the battle-dead, sheer and lined with the palest light. It was shocking. Nobody just walked away from Malika in the middle of the conversation. Not one like this. 

Another breath. And then Bull’s feet were moving before he knew it, plowing through the sand after him.

They had just made it clear of the camp, past a craggy outcropping of stones Malika liked to stand and scout on in the evenings. Dorian showed no sign of slowing, or even if he knew Bull followed. 

“That’s not your call,” Bull said, voice raised. The wind was low, and even several paces ahead, Dorian could hear him. He knew it, because he stopped in his tracks, a hand balled into a fist at his side. 

“I don’t know where you think you’re headed,” Bull said, and he leaned a little to catch his breath, “but this doesn’t have shit to do with you.” 

“Three days ago,” Dorian said, not even bothering to turn and look Bull in the eye, “you could scarcely say the word _demon._ ” 

Bull said, “Listen,” like it would have any kind of effect. 

It didn’t. He twisted his head over his shoulder. “And now you want to go rummaging through the bowels of the earth. You froze yourself to that ruin, last time you touched it. I suppose you’ve forgotten that too.” 

Bull opened his mouth, but Dorian turned in the sand, livid as he’d ever seen him. “What a teacher I am,” he said. “One week, and you’re prepared to stand under molten fire when the Inquisitor snaps her fingers. One week, and you’ll tumble down into the abyss without taking ten minutes to think about it.” 

“Dorian,” he said. 

The way he said it had a physical effect—as though it were a hand laid on his shoulder he promptly had to shake off. His shoulders trembled, and the glare he cast was sharp as a dagger’s point. “What a marvel,” Dorian spat. “What fucking _pedagogy._ ” 

Bull let the quiet have a moment. Waited out the venom. Dorian’s shoulders rose and fell as he tried to quell his hard breathing, to crush whatever he felt under the heavy heel of composure. It didn’t work. 

“It’s my choice,” Bull said, finally. 

“Ha.” A humorless snarl. “I didn’t know Qunari could be naive. How enlightening.” 

He gave him a hard look. “I know she wants to use me,” he said. “I’m the right tool to solve the puzzle.” 

The truth, though it made Malika sound too malicious—concentration wasn’t a sin, most places, until you forgot the bigger picture. Getting what she wanted, dogged as she was, made her a sharp Inquisitor. This was just the first time he’d felt that blade against the hairs on the back of his neck. 

“So don’t _go_ ,” Dorian replied, forehead creasing with lines. “Tell her to fuck off and we’ll live with her disappointment on the way home.” 

Bull sighed. “That’s not--” 

“She’ll live,” he interrupted, eyes flashing. “You won’t.” 

“I’m good at not dying,” Bull said plainly. “Done okay so far. That’s my job.” 

“And you’re mine.” He fixed him with a painfully honest look. “My task. My responsibility. And I say no.” 

Bull squinted at him. “It’s my life,” he said slowly. “I decide. You don’t like that concept.” He pressed down the nagging part of him that wanted to add, _just like a ‘Vint._ But they had to be beyond that, now. Better. 

“Because she’s not concerned with it.” Dorian gestured beyond them back at camp. “She almost lost her hands and it’s got the score on her, and she needs to win. Finding out what happened to you is an extra carrot.” 

He shook his head. “You’re winding too far,” he warned. 

“That’s not the point.” Dorian pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Just briefly, for a moment, like he could no longer hold up his head. It stopped Bull’s tongue. “You took that hit,” he said, “to save her. And me.” His voice changed on those last two words, choked in the back of his throat. “She’s forgotten.” 

Bull stared at him, knowing how blank and empty his face must look.

Dorian’s arms dropped to his sides, a listless gesture he’d never seen before. Not throwing the towel in. Not even close. It only said, _this is all I have._ “I didn’t.”

Enough in those two words to kill him, if he dwelt on it too long. He could taste the heat, crackling with anger, on his tongue. He rubbed his thumb against the base of his neck, and looked down at the sand. 

“Bull, please.” Dorian’s voice went soft, but lost none of its fire. “I can’t guarantee you’ll walk out of there. I can’t let you do it.” 

“You’ll live with it,” Bull said, and the words didn’t tremble on their way out of his mouth. “But I need this.” 

He had asked the question, once, and the answer was an answer. It staggered Dorian a little, like a quake unraveled under his feet. Bull ran his tongue along the inside of his mouth. “You wanted to know,” he said. “I can’t go on with no direction. No reason why. She’s right. You know she is, or you wouldn’t give a shit.” 

Dorian shifted his weight on his feet, his face falling into shadow. The moon glowed behind them, faint behind a hazy cloud. 

“This crap takes and takes,” Bull said. “Everything’s changed. I’m never gonna sleep right again. Never--” A shiver of cold ran up his spine, right on cue, and he didn’t stop the shudder. Never be warm again. “I’m not the same. So I want something back. I’m going down there. If there’s an answer, I’m gonna beat the shit out of it.” 

“Bull,” Dorian began, but Bull held up a hand, and all was silent. 

He exhaled once. “Now, you coming?” he asked. “Or are you gonna make me do it alone?” 

~~~

Wrenching the tomb open ended up being less dramatic than he’d anticipated. Dorian and Vivienne, standing at attention, green fire cascading from their open arms in slow arcs. It sank into the stone, wedged in a weak spot, and pried it open foot by foot until it was just wide enough for Bull to clear, if he hunched down and took care for his horns. Reminded Bull of eating oysters on the shore, finding just the right spot to slide your knife in and pop the goods out. 

That easy. Or not—magic made it look simple. Bull knew firsthand now how little things took a lot out of you. And then they all stood at the opening. 

Stairs, all the way down. Malika walked in without a word, crossbow latched to her back, and made a vague gesture to follow. She hadn’t said anything all morning, and it looked like the rest of the day would be more of the same. Mostly weariness. Maybe a little sulking. He couldn’t remember the last time anybody had disagreed with her outright on an issue she felt so strongly about. It’d be good for her. And good for them, too, to remember she didn’t call every shot. 

Thing was, nobody talked much. He and Dorian had walked back to the camp, and he’d wordlessly joined Vivienne at the entrance when she said asked for his help. But even in the act of casting the spell, of moving the stones—his brow was set in a firm, disapproving line. Not happy about it. Bull could live with that. 

So they traveled down the narrow stairs. Dorian held his hand aloft, and a soft orb of light bloomed from it, hanging above their heads like a lantern. Deathroot had wormed its way through the stone. The light sparkled in the ruby-red knots gnarled in the corners. The stone walls were black with coal dust, as though someone’d been burning away down in the pits of the place. You could run your finger along and leave a clean trail. 

When Bull’s horns scraped across the ceiling, the tips froze over. Sent a trail of sparks down his spine. But he shoved it down, tightened his jaw. _Enough_ , he thought, when his heart threatened to race. 

Vivienne talked through the path as they wound their way down. Here was the first door, the easiest, opened with dust from each wall and deathroot, crushed into a paste with spirits and spit. Smear it across the gear, and it turned open like a hot knife through butter. It’d taken them all of a quarter of an hour on the first day. 

Malika opened the door for them, let them all pass through to the next room. He could tell it had been beautiful once. Walls, filled with bottles of starlight. Melted obsidian dotted with milk. 

Now most of the vials were smashed to pieces, black night leaching all over the floor, grains of white shining up from the stone. Bull gazed close at them, but not too close. Squid ink, Vivienne explained, and bits of minerals. Quartz, diamond, paragon’s luster, fool’s gold, lazurite. The trick had been to find the one holding blue diamond. Pick the wrong one, and the skeletons made an appearance. She gestured to a broken trap door in the corner. The wrong bottles burned hot when you touched them, or cold enough for frostbite. It had taken time. 

And the last door. Bull could smell the fire even before Malika walked them into the room. It boiled over in a smooth curtain, water-slick. He could see where the explosion had scarred the ceiling, the walls. 

They came close to the flame. Bull looked at Dorian, who paused for a clear moment of hesitation before raising sending his lantern close. 

A little hard to tell, in the orange light. But it was silver, through and through.

“Perfect,” said Malika, hard and unflinching. “Since we’ve settled that. Bull, if you please.” 

She shrugged at the curtain of molten flame, and stepped out of Bull’s way. Dorian’s face twisted a little in the shadow. He could read it, plain as a book. But he waited. 

Bull wondered if a priest had ever wondered about mages touching on the Qun, or if a Tal-Vashoth would ever think _the statue resists_ to cover himself in diamond, far below the surface, in order to part a sea of fire. He thought of asking Dorian, later, to see if it would get a scoff out of him. 

It was smooth, this time. _The statue resists._ The second skin, rigid with diamond, sliding over him in geometric scales. They caught a little light from the fire, gave a half-hearted glimmer. 

He could hear Malika shifting her weight from foot to foot somewhere behind him, but then Dorian was there, right at his side, as if on cue. 

“Take your time,” he said. “Go slow.” 

“Planned on it.” He couldn’t help but drawl a little. “Can’t exactly sprint in this crap.” 

He lifted his heavy hand to the streaming fire, and didn’t even wait for the span of a breath to pass. He shoved his hand inside. 

The fire parted around it. It tingled against his skin. Not with heat. Like being raked with a little steel wool. The armor tightened a little at the trial—he could feel the pressure against his skin as it curled harder against him. 

His other hand, next. Slid them all the way through. No door, anymore. Only the heavy curtain of fire, like the entrance into a lady’s boudoir. 

Vivienne made a noise. “Bull,” she said, but there was no use waiting. He took a step in, and felt the fire cascade down over his head. It flowed down his nose, his jaws, pooled a little in his ears before sluicing out onto his shoulders. Clogged them, even, like putting his head under the surface of a river, and dripped from the tips of his horns. 

He turned perpendicular to the curtain, and raised his arms. Made a little arch. The fire flowed down his fingers. Wasn’t perfect, but if they moved quick enough, they wouldn’t get scorched. 

He couldn’t see any of them, didn’t know how they stared or if Malika took notes again, if Vivienne’s lips pursed or Dorian’s gaze darkened. If he wrung his hands a little in anxiety, or if he just stood tall and watched it happen. But they moved quick. Malika first, barely ducking under the arch. Then Vivienne, her robe hissing where it brushed the edge of the fire. Smell of hot steam and singe. 

Dorian, last. When he ducked under the arch of Bull’s arm, he touched his fingers to his gem-covered ribs. A little space where the quicksilver hadn’t washed over the armor. A brush, gentle. Not alone. Simple reassurance. Here and gone. 

Important enough to risk a burned finger or two. 

Bull didn’t shy away from touch. Never had, and the past week had made him wary of every brush, every knock. Ever since that first conversation—what happens when you touch the ruin, what shit will you unleash if you touch Malika—he’d guarded the way he moved. Even brushing up against the ruin took effort, breath, and the grind-down of calm. 

At the same time, there was the memory of Dorian’s hands on his neck, a smack on the arm for a crude joke. The toe of his boot against Bull’s foot. Casual, unguarded and—unafraid. 

He didn’t know why the thought caught him so hard, but it made him linger under the fire for another moment more. He had to get his shit together, had to breathe. 

Bull swallowed, felt the scales at his throat shift and click, and fumbled out of the other side of the fire. Stood steady for a few minutes, to let the last of the quicksilver run off him, pool into razor-sharp stalagmites on the ground. 

“Good work,” said Malika. The walls were painted with white ruins the size of her palm. They glowed like a collection of little moons. She meandered over to the far wall. “Vivienne?” she asked, and her voice sounded a little more like itself. “Don’t you think this looks like what’s carved into the threshold? Come see.” 

Vivienne moved to follow, her robe swishing over the ground. But Dorian stood in front of him, lantern in his hands. Orange shadows cast on his face, the glow of the fire behind them. 

“Are you well?” he asked, peering up through the diamond. Malika’s picture slid across his brain. Did Dorian see the nothing, when he looked at his face, or did he see Bull looking down at him? 

“Eh,” he finally said. “Pretty half-assed hot spring.” 

Dorian huffed a laugh, more of an exhale than anything else. “We’ll find a volcano next time,” he said. “Something to really sink your teeth into.” 

The lantern in his hand cast little lights in his eyes. Bull couldn’t look away.

He waited too long. Dorian furrowed his brow. “We’re all through, Bull. You can let it down.” He tapped at Bull’s elbow with the knuckles of two fingers, and even though the room glowed with heat, warmth bloomed from that little touch, enough to make Bull inhale a breath through his teeth. 

And then the floor fell through. 

~~~ 

The armor probably saved him. He hit a cliff on the way down—cracked the tip of a craggy rock off the wall, and careened down like a bag of rocks dumped in a lake. The landing should have broken every bone in his body. It didn’t. 

But the armor stayed put, latched to every inch of him. When he opened his bleary eye, and found he couldn’t move for the weight of the stone, his heart threatened to cave in on itself. Didn’t know any better. Forgot how to call it down. Forgot he could do it at all. 

Bull’s brain became one bleary string of _fuck, fuck, fuck_ , and all other words ran scared. His breath rattled in his throat, wheezing in and out between his teeth so fast he couldn’t tell if his lungs still worked. Tried to sit up and couldn’t. Legs too heavy to pull up. Even his head sank to the ground. His eyelid trembled with the weight of stone carved up his eyelashes. 

Everybody who’d seen a crypt wondered what it would be like to be trapped inside before you were grub for worms. Bull was sure this was it, a coffin for his body just before it got tossed on the pyre or down to the bottom of the pit. And the thought choked every nerve. Too much, to be locked in himself this tight. He stopped breathing at all, vision going grey at the edges. Just when the fog of unconsciousness leaned in and licked its lips, ready to claim him--

“Bull,” croaked a voice, and then there was heat. Sudden and stark on his wrist, a flush that swept up his arm with the keen pattern of memory. Tracing rivers on a map, sliding along tributaries. Or veins. It all blurred together. “ _Breathe_ , you lummox.” 

An old flair of instinct, blood red survival—a mage, doing magic, doing magic _on him_ , that fucker—and then the swift memory of lying cold in his bedroll, Dorian’s hands curved about his neck. _I’m not casting anything_ , he’d said. _It’s just you, pulling it out of me._ The contentment in his voice. 

It was just enough to make him take a lungful of air, and then another, and another. The heat never abated. He could see Dorian out of the corner of his eye now, hunched over him. One hand latched around his wrist, the other hesitating in the air, unsure of where to touch. 

Bull knew where he wanted it, but his tongue went still in his head. Breathing had cleared the buzzing between his ears enough to try. He arched his neck, tips of his diamond horns pressing into the ground beneath him. 

Fingertips landed with deft precision on his throat, and the warmth flooded up through his windpipe, the taste of melting snow on his tongue. _The tide falls_ , Bull remembered, and water began to sluice in slow drip down his jaw, his ears. 

It took awhile. Longer than usual. But Dorian sat there, patient and unmoving. The warm brown skin of his face and neck was dusted with coal-black dirt. Cuts on his arms, a bruise already forming on his cheek. 

He reached up and wiped away where the diamond had melted onto his cheeks, ice catching in the corner of his eyes. 

Bull sat up, a little too fast. Dorian scooted back on his knees, hands on the ground. 

“You okay? Fuck,” said Bull. “That— _fuck._ ” 

“Quite,” Dorian said. He brushed his own face with the back of his hand, and only ended up smearing the dust. “I’m fine. Slowed myself before I hit the ground.” 

Bull pitched his head back and looked at the ceiling. “You see Malika or Vivienne?” 

Dorian shook his head. 

Confirmed it. “That wasn’t a cave-in,” he said. “Trap, for sure.” 

“Maybe they walked out of the radius.” Dorian thumbed his chin. 

“Can you--” asked Bull, twiddling his fingers. Dorian cupped his hands and soft light opened up in his palms. The room was unfinished—the inside of a cave more than anything else. Too dark to see the top of where they’d fallen. No light at all. 

But there was a crude hall, roughed out by a committed individual or by the slow tide of nature, and a long passageway of rock leading east. The only way to go. Pointed like an arrow. 

Bull lurched to his feet. Overbalanced a little, and then stood steady. Still had his axe. Looked back up at the darkness. Should wait, he thought, for Malika. Vivienne. See if they figured out a way to undo it before going deeper, or straight into another trap. They’d be fucked it they got stuck. 

He turned, opening his mouth to say just as much, but Dorian had already begun to walk forward. His lantern climbed back up to its usual spot above his head, a little sun in the darkness. “Come on,” he said, wandering down the hall. 

“You don’t think we should wait?” Bull asked, a little hesitant. The hall was wide and dark as a nightmare’s mouth. Felt stupid, to hesitate here, but—at least above, he’d known the path through the tomb. Could turn and go, if he wanted. 

“Answers await, yes?” Dorian twisted his head over his shoulder. “We won’t get anywhere by sitting.” 

~~~

Of course, the passageway was fucking endless. 

Bull kept a lookout—for trip wire, traps, for runes glowing sudden and hot on the walls. Dorian would stop a squint at the walls every so often, holding his light close for examination, but found nothing worth their attention. It was just cavern rock, hollowed out by water. 

Bull cleared his throat, finally, when they rounded a bend. “Yesterday,” he said, finally. 

“I’m not going to apologize.” Dorian’s voice was clipped, but not sharp. 

He blinked. “Wasn’t gonna ask for it.” 

“Oh.” The distinct silence of preening feathers. But he didn’t retract a word. 

“When we get back,” Bull said, assuming they made it out of the tomb alive, assuming they even made it back to Skyhold at all, “you don’t—I’m not holding you to this.” 

“Into what?” 

Bull made a vague motion between them. “Whatever _this_ is,” he said. “Being your responsibility.” 

“Ah.” Now his voice ran cold. “I see. Thank you for the out.” 

“Give me a minute,” he said. “It’s not--” 

Dorian increased his pace, walked ahead instead of in time. The lantern moved in long, lazy circles around his head, like a halo. Bull wondered if it was a nervous tic, like tapping fingers or crossing your arms. He tracked the movement revolution after revolution. 

He ran a hand over his face. “Nobody really asked if you wanted this or not,” Bull said, finally. “You got yanked by the balls into it. Good reasons, sure. But. Nobody asked. And you should get the chance to say no.” 

No sign from Dorian whether or not that sunk in. He just kept an eye on the back of his head. More silence, then, as they kept walking. 

“I don’t like this,” Dorian said, after another fifteen minutes of quiet. “It doesn’t feel like we’re crawling through a tomb.” 

“Yeah?” Bull asked, grateful at least for the sound. 

He shook his head. “It’s like walking through someone’s house.” 

He was right. An eerie silence settled in Bull’s stomach. Explained why the traps seemed to stop, then. Or they just hadn’t barged into them. Bull listened for the sound of water, for drafts breezing past him in the hall. Not that he’d be able to feel them much. He was just as cold down here as he was on the surface. Either way, it meant a way out, after all of this was over. But there was nothing. 

And Dorian said, “Look—there.” 

A flick of his fingers, and the lantern swished over to the rock. Bull squinted at it—and there it was.

A wheel in the wall. Just like the gear to open the door, but smaller. Dorian touched it gently with a fingertip, then pressed his hand in. It didn’t turn. 

Bull leaned down, close enough for his nose to touch it. Dorian aimed the light. “Hole in the center,” he said. “Looks like something’s supposed to be there.” 

Dorian let loose a string of colorful Tevene. “All that,” he said, at the end, “and we need to find a key?”

“We could knock,” Bull said, “and see if somebody’s home.” 

But even as he said, something about the shape caught his eye. _Right size_ , he thought automatically. For what? 

“We can double back,” Dorian said out loud, fingers pressed to his brow. “See if we missed something. A rune somewhere, maybe. Or maybe it’s under a rock. Good on them, to utilize their surroundings. We will probably starve to death before we find it.” He kicked a stone over with his foot, and Bull admired how even that little gesture could be the epitome of hatefulness. 

_A rock_ , Dorian had said. 

“Hold the light closer,” Bull requested, and started fumbling in his pockets. He didn’t know what he was looking for until his hand closed around it. 

He fumbled in his pocket. Found pulled out the diamond he coughed up a couple days before, dreaming of coals and telling demons to fuck off. He held it out in his hand, triumphantly as a kid who found a worm. 

Dorian’s eyes widened. “You’re not serious,” he said. “You’re--” He crouched down by the wheel, peering at the opening. 

Bull thumbed the stone into place, and for a handful of moments, there was nothing. A gap long enough for Dorian to give a quiet sigh, and shift his weight on his heels. But then—a distinctive click that echoed in the silence of the passage. 

Dorian reached up and slid his fingertips into the gear, and turned. A heavy _thump_ resounded, and a wave of dust poured from the ceiling. They both hauled back, remembering Malika getting stuck in the door and nearly losing her hands. 

The door swung open, wide, to a dark and musty room. Before Bull could launch in, Dorian touched his arm in silent _hold._ With a wave of his hand, his lantern bobbed into the space. 

Piles of books, scrolls of parchment unwound all over the floor. Shelves of bronze tools, little spoons and weights and a set of scales that covered an entire table, and looked to be made of pure gold. A desk covered in tiny vials, some of them filled with squid ink, or tipped over, or broken into little pieces. That was all he could see, but Dorian was already on his feet and stepping into the space. “That’s a laboratory,” he said, a little obviously, but he’d already barreled in. Bull followed slower—checked the door for wires, the first few steps in for traps. What few steps he could take. 

The room looked like Malika’s brain, he figured, if somebody stole in there and upturned every shelf, and threw everything to the ground. The soot-stained ceiling hung low, and made it feel as though they’d all been shoved inside a desk drawer and forgotten with all the junk. 

Dorian raised his hand to an oil lamp and cast Bull a look—he nodded mutely, and then the lamp glowed with a touch of fire. 

You couldn’t walk in the room without stepping on shit. Shards of pottery gathered around the table legs—broken during use and swept off the surface in haste. A bucket shoved on the bottom shelf of a bookstand that was definitely used for piss, and so old it had left nothing but stains behind. And paper. Fucking paper, everywhere, and discarded quills, and empty ink-pots. What looked to be an entire herb garden, dried and labeled, spread out in a corner over an old quilt. 

The smell hit next. Like Malika’s hands, but with the fine odor of rot, decay, and dust. There was a pallet in the corner, a bare mattress and a blanket-covered lump. Bull wandered over and pulled up the corner. “Dead,” he called over his shoulder. 

“And good riddance,” muttered Dorian. There were more oil lamps, strewn on tables and shelves. Dorian flicked his fingers and more of them lit up, and golden light bathed the room. 

Looking at the corpse, Bull said aloud, “I figure it’s a year, maybe two.” 

“Can you tell what did it?” Dorian threw the book aside and started piecing through the books, on the hunt for a specific tome. 

“Isn’t that supposed to be your thing?” Bull asked, but he was too busy digging. He glanced at the skull. “Looks like it was just in his sleep. But fuck if I know.” 

Dorian yanked a massive book out from beneath the pile, upturning two stacks onto the floor. They teetered and fell with a loud _smack_. His fingers searched the cover and undid a wide bronze buckle. When he yanked the tome open, dust puffed out from the pages. 

The only wall not covered in shelving had an old velvet hanging tacked to the top. Bull reached up and tugged it down, ripping it out of its nails. The wall was just—parchment. Scribbled and drawn on and tacked up. You couldn’t see the wall any longer, just scraps of old paper. 

And—a massive dragon, crafted in painstaking detail on the wall. 

“This is all in shitting _Nevarran_ ,” muttered Dorian, flipping through pages. “I can’t read it.” 

“Uh," Bull said. Something in his voice made Dorian turn, and there was the sound of the book being dropped to the desk, and then he was wading through papers. 

Same dragon. Painted with a horse-hair brush and a tender hand. 

“Whiskers and all,” breathed Dorian, and shuffled through the parchment until he was close enough to judge. The dragon was painted ceiling to floor, and done in gold-leaf. Bit by bit, dabbed from the palette on a finger until the whole dragon was covered in it. It held nearly the whole wall, and surrounded Dorian’s head like a golden frame. Silver, glittering, fell in sweet curls from its mouth, waves falling to earth. 

He touched the wall with hesitant fingertips, and then motioned Bull over with a hurried gesture. Bull came, and Dorian pointed to the dragon’s claws. 

“Touch it,” he said. 

Bull pressed the back of his hand to the wall. They were textured, sticking out from the flat surface. Someone took time with paste, too. He ran his thumbnail, felt the molten edge, the familiar raw planes. 

“The same?” asked Dorian. 

He nodded, and Dorian exhaled. 

“He’s an alchemist,” he muttered, fingers at his temples. “We know that—look at the protections on the temple, the state of this place—it’s all alchemy. What does an alchemist want with a dragon?” 

“I don’t know,” Bull said, uselessly. 

“You don’t—feel any different, do you?” Dorian rounded on him. 

“Like what?” 

Dorian sighed. “I don’t know,” he said. “Anything. Anything at all.” 

"Nope." A raw diamond, the size of a walnut, was welded to the wall. Bull pressed his thumb to it. Dorian shuffled around him to the notes, leaning so close his nose brushed the paper. Muttering to himself. 

His eye was drawn back to the painting, to the care it was made with. The reverence. Nobody’d ever see it but the corpse in the corner. A place like this, tucked under the world—he had to do it for himself, and nobody else. A blank wall. An empty space in need of filling. 

The thought flared again, suddenly. 

“A blank wall,” he said. Dorian ignored him, yanking notes off the wall in a systematic effort to skim them all for answers. “Dorian—it’s blank.” 

Dorian only shot him a passing glance over the top of the parchment. “You’ll have to talk more,” he said. “Mind-reading isn’t one of my assets.” 

He thought of Vivienne, making tinctures out of elfroot and lazurite to cure burns. “The point is to change one thing into another, right?” he asked. He kept his thumb on the diamond. 

“Yes,” Dorian said, tossing another sheaf of paper to the floor. 

“We keep thinking the dragon’s different,” Bull said. “Weird and old.” He went on without glancing at Dorian. “I dunno if it was. I think it was in the wrong place at the right time.” 

This made Dorian pause, lower the parchment away from his nose. 

“You get your hands on a dragon,” Bull said slowly, heart beginning to pound. “Fuck if I know how. And it breathes fire, or frost, or whatever it does.” 

Dorian waved his hand. “The motivation is—hard to grasp.” 

“Yeah.” Bull looked at the metallic whorls spilling out of the dragon’s mouth. “But now you’ve got this massive thing, and you don’t know what to do with it. Maybe you stop seeing a dragon.” He swallowed. “Maybe you start seeing a canvas.” 

An empty look of horror crossed Dorian’s face, and his brow furrowed. “You can do anything you want,” he said slowly. “Like the goose, laying golden eggs.” 

“Why stop there?” said Bull. “Change its scales to gold. Make it spew silver fire.” 

“Give it diamond armor,” murmured Dorian. “Diamond claws.” He let the parchment in his hands drop to the floor. It fell slow, wafting side to side until it met the rest. 

A numbness settled behind Bull’s eyes, slid down to his stomach. That’s all it was. Shit. 

“This is— _ludicrous.”_ Dorian looked wildly about the little room, as though there were better answers tucked behind the piss-bucket, or secreted away between old tomes. “Why? Think of what it could buy, perhaps. But all the way out here, in the middle of _nowhere_ \--”

“Because why not,” Bull said. He couldn’t keep the dullness out of his voice. “Why fucking not?” 

It changed the air in the room. Dorian raised his head. 

Bull didn’t know what he expected, but the taste of discovery was bitter. Some mage with a fucked up sense of ambition doing what he shouldn’t, unchecked, in the middle of nowhere. And there Bull was—wrong place, wrong time. Just like the beast under the sand. 

“Bull,” said Dorian, “it’s not--” 

“I wanted answers.” He turned, boots stomping through parchment till he got to the door. “We found them. Let’s go.” 

“But we don’t know.” There was a hint of a plea in his voice, careful. “It’s not all there is.” 

“Seems like it,” Bull said. “Greed, ambition, torture—the whole family’s here.” 

Dorian blanched, but took a breath. “You’re not wrong,” he said. “How was he keeping it here? It wasn’t bound with a chain, or with a spell.” 

“I’ve had enough.” Bull didn’t recognize the sound of his own voice. Dragged a mile under the ground for nothing but what he could’ve figured out himself, if he spent half a second thinking about it. Hungry mages, bored with their own power, deciding what kind of life they could bring to heel next. 

Dorian stopped talking, turned to the desk. Bull waited for the lecture, the cutting barb about how he was getting exactly what he wanted, what he’d claimed he needed for all the desert to hear, and no, it wasn’t savory because what was in this shitty world? 

Instead, Dorian said, “It doesn’t change you, Bull.” 

He blinked. Dorian paged open another tome, more as a distraction than anything else. “What?” 

“You talk of it like a disease, sometimes.” Dorian plopped the tome onto a pile on the floor; it teetered and stayed standing. “It takes, it ruins. More evidence for your ledger about why this never should have happened. All your grief. You’re not wrong,” he repeated. 

Bull stood there, listening. Watching Dorian bow his head and pick up another book. 

“But It doesn’t change you,” Dorian said. “You’ll still be the one who decides to cock up the world with it, or try something worthwhile. Your choice.” He tossed another book onto the stack. This time it wobbled and slid to the ground, tome by tome. “Funnily enough, you know that already.” 

A long silence passed, as Dorian went through the contents of the desk. Pressed his hands into one of the gold disks of the scale. And Bull stood there, watching him work. 

He could go. That’s what this was. He could turn and head out the door, and Dorian would follow as they tried to claw their way to the surface, or wherever they needed to in order to survive. They’d make it, surely. Between the two of them, they’d figure something out. He could leave this here and suck down bitterness forever—his hands, his sleep, the cold. All changed by fate, and some boot-licker’s greed. 

He turned his head to look at the painting of the dragon again. 

“It was sleeping,” he said. 

Dorian’s spine straightened, and his shoulders relaxed a little into their easy line. Relief. Pure and simple. It made Bull’s chest hurt to notice. “That’s right,” he said. 

“Sleeping,” Bull repeated. “Waiting.” 

The word sparked a light in Dorian. “ _Waiting_ ,” he said. 

And then he seized the desk and overturned it in one fell swoop. Bull stepped back out of the way the room filled with the clattering of books and wood. The scale rang like a gong when it smacked the ground. 

“A door,” Dorian said. “There’s got to be a wheel in here.” He twiddled his fingers. 

“You think--” 

“No chains, and no magic keeping it here,” Dorian repeated. A bookshelf went next, and Bull didn’t even blink when it smashed into the floor, the joints popping out and shards of wood flying every which direction. “Why would it choose to stay? There’s a _reason_.” 

Bull turned his head back to the mural. Padded over, step by step, while Dorian overturned another bookshelf, looking for a gear in the wall, the line of the door. Why hide it behind a curtain unless there was something to be hidden? 

The diamond, embedded just below the dragon’s open mouth. Didn’t press it, like before. He took hold of it in two fingers, and it turned. 

Stone moved—a loud crack split the line between the painting and the wall opened. A shadowed passageway. “Mages not believe in lights?” he asked. He’d give his left ass-cheek to skip another dark hallway. 

Dorian stood in the center of his hurricane, hair tousled, and a piece of parchment stuck to his boot. “Well,” he said. “That’s one way.” 

“Come on,” said Bull. “Let’s not waste time.” He moved to duck inside—it’d take a minute to squeeze through with his bulk and his horns. 

But Dorian hesitated, dusting his hands. “I imagine your _answers_ are that way,” he said. “I won’t intrude.” 

Playing on that out, Bull realized. From their clipped conversation hours ago. It was an easy choice. Easiest one he’d made since dropping down into the tomb. “Nah,” he said. “Shouldn’t go alone.” 

Quiet. Made the pit drop out of his stomach. Thought he’d shake his head, wave him on. And then it’d be over. 

“Your responsibility,” Bull said, trying to slip lightness into his tone and failing. “Right?” 

“I--” Dorian hesitated, and Bull’s heart jumped into his throat. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose it is.” 

“But you’re smaller,” said Bull. “You go first.” 

Dorian went inside, lantern wobbling near his head, and Bull wedged in after. It was blissfully quick, at least—twenty feet of stone wall, until they met a doorway that only came up to Bull’s waist. 

“Malika will be so pissed,” said Bull. “Door’s fucking _made_ for her, and she’s not here.” 

Dorian laughed, short and genuine, before dropping down and sliding through on his knees. “I won’t tell her if you won’t.” 

Bull went down next, aimed his head through before dragging himself in by the arms. He was halfway through the door, head just coming out of the threshold. “So what did it--” 

Dorian’s hand, instantly came down upon his scalp, just between his horns. Not to warn him. Simply because he had to steady himself. Warmth tingled the top of his head—he swore it traveled all the way to the tips of his horns. 

“Not it,” Dorian breathed. “ _She._ ” 

Bull looked up, and stared. “Is that--” 

An egg. 

Big as a dwarf all rolled up on herself. A tarnished grey, like well-worked metal on the edge of rusting. Sitting on a brazier long since gone cold, on a slate-tile floor, alone in the room. 

“Yes,” he replied, voice curiously high. “Yes. It is.” 

“Holy fuck,” said Bull, and pried himself out of the door. 

They approached it slowly, like anybody would—as though it might jump out of them, or crack if they breathed the wrong way. “A reason to stay,” said Dorian, with a curious sadness. 

“To wait,” said Bull, and they stood in front of it, staring. “For as long as it took.” 

The sadness rippled through the room, little waves touching every piece. Tragedy, waste. All for nothing. Bull felt bile slide up his throat, and it bit it back, shoved it down. 

“Maybe he led her here,” Dorian said, crossing his arms. “Lured her.” He rested his cheek against his palm. “It doesn’t matter, I suppose. Maker.” 

“Is it dead?” Bull asked. Bitterness lay like a film on his tongue. Another husk for the desert. Another corpse for the Wastes. 

Dorian shook his head. “I don’t know,” he answered. 

His stomach knotted once, twice. Tuneless music filled his ears. The kind he heard when calling the armor—the sound of metal and ice, finding itself. The cold underneath his skin, shifting in wonder. He could be honest. It broke his heart, to find it here. Even before he started spitting them out like teeth, no diamond could be rarer than what sat in front of them, quiet and dead. 

Bull reached out, not thinking, and pressed his big hand against the shell. 

For a breath, he thought he’d reel forward, like when he’d touched the dragon’s corpse. Shoved into memory, or magic, or whatever made up the space between his ears now. 

Then a pulse jumped under his hand. 

He sucked in air through his teeth; Dorian whirled on him, eyes wide. “What?” he said, voice sharp with worry. “Bull--” 

The pulse jumped again, and again. Out of rhythm. Struggling to keep up, stay in time. _Please_ , Bull thought. His whole body tuned to the word, like wheat growing towards the sunrise. 

“ _Bull_ ,” snapped Dorian, all demand. Bull reached across and grabbed his hand, pressed it to the shell. 

 

The pulse leapt, a beating of wings, and Dorian swore out loud. “How?” he asked. “I—that’s not possible.” 

And then they fell silent, listening to the pulse skip—one-two, one-two, one-two. Dorian took his free hand, wrapped his fingers around Bull’s wrist. Heat, instantly. His own pulse built in his ears. 

All in time. In concert, like the heart and the lungs. Everything working together at once. He could feel them all, pumping in and out. Breathing. Trying to live. Trying to fight. 

“How’s that happening?” he muttered. “How?”

“The Maker,” said Dorian. His voice was soft with wonder. “Miracles. I don’t know. You.” 

He took a breath. “Don’t think so,” he said. 

Dorian shook his head. His fingertips pressed into the pulse point of Bull’s wrist. Holding him. “The melody,” he said. “The center. The focus. Whatever you want to call it.” He looked at the egg, Bull realized, because he couldn’t look him in the eye. “All you, now.” 

He didn’t know how long they stood there, trapped in the loop. Unable to move for the music of it. A little like a heartbeat, a little like the sea. Tugged together in an impossible knot, just as everything felt as though it was falling apart. 

Was this what an answer felt like, Bull wondered. Clarity. Solutions. Emptiness, filled. But he had no tama to ask. 

Dorian shifted his weight from foot to foot, adjusting his stance so close to the egg. A plate beneath them tilted, buckling in, and _boom—_

A trap. They’d forgotten. 

Black smoke poured from the ceiling. Dorian turned towards the sound—the oldest trick in the book, Bull reached for him, but it was too fast. A panel on the wall swung open, quick as lightning. 

And then—then—the sound of crossbolt arrows singing through the air. He could hear them individually, like harmony in a song. One, two, three. Bull reached—to do what, he didn’t know. To snatch them from the air. To catch them in his cold—for a moment he pictured them freezing in mid-air, shuddering, dropping to the ground. 

Instead, they slid straight through the smoke surrounding them. _Shhk, shhk, shhk._

Dorian wobbled and fell, Bull catching him in the circle of his arms just before his knees hit the ground. And just like that, it was over. 

“Shit,” slurred Dorian. “Shit, shit.”

“Stop talking,” commanded Bull as they sank down.

Blood welled at the corner of his lips. Bull wiped it away with a thumb, and then searched him for a healing potion. Nothing.

“Cracked in the fall,” he said. “It was from quite a height, after all.” His gaze was already half lidded. 

“Dorian,” Bull said. “Dorian.” He said his name like an incantation, as though through some ritual he could wish himself more time. 

Blood again welled at the corner of his lips, this time dripping a line down his chin, and then his eyes closed. That quick. 

They had been standing there, a moment ago, and now time had disappeared. Panic thrummed through Bull’s veins. Dorian lay still, his chest just barely heaving under his robes. 

Memory pressed insistently at his consciousness. Sunrise, standing at the top of a house on the edge of Qunandar. Par Vollen mornings struck solid lines in the horizons—the sky, cobalt blue, deeper than shadow, tinged with black, covered everything. Then orange, bright as fire, in one solid stripe. The desert, he’d thought as a child. Before he understood the world, he thought it unfurled itself at his feet every morning. There is the sea, wide and blue. There is the desert, long and flame. 

The sun, then, its golden egg of glory, too bright too look at long. All three rose in the sky. A true Par Vollen sunrise slid along the ground. He tipped his chin, and watched a swathe of red—bright crimson, not the rust of dried blood or the deep-wine of fresh, passed along the trees, the craters, the dust. It cut the ground like a knife. There is what is ours, red and bright.

It was the color, fading at the corner of Dorian’s mouth. It meant nothing, to hold magic, if it was no better than an axe and a shield. 

Time, he thought. It’s all I need. Please. 

If you love purpose, said the cold, fall into the tide. Let it carry you. 

The sound of the sea pressing at the shore. He thought of a heart in his hand, of heat and flame, of Dorian’s wrist pressed into his palm. _If you love purpose._ Blood dripping from razor wire. The tide coming in on a beach in Seheron. _Let it carry you._ Dorian’s shoulders, defiant and golden in the sun as he walked away. Brushing past him under the fire. The deliberate precision of his steps. Fingers against his pulse. The two of them, listening to Bull’s blood thrum in time. _Let it carry you._

Bull closed his eye, and fell. 

~~~

He woke in the midst of the dark. Fire flickered near him. Not fire—just light. Orange and familiar. 

In the distance, twitches of conversation. ( _\--believe the_ mess, _Vivienne? What’s the point of notes if you don’t keep them straight?_ ) 

Warm heat at his side. A body, near his. It took most of his energy just to turn his head a little. Every muscle creaked with the effort. 

Dorian sat there, legs curled under him, close enough so his knee rested against his side. Bull blinked once, twice. Slow as he could. No illusions. He noticed the movement of his face, and turned. 

“Sweet dreams?” he asked, and a smile broke over his face, stark with relief. 

But Bull had no thought to spare for jests—Dorian, Dorian had been so hurt, blood bubbling at his lips—his hand reached up and pressed against his belly where a crossbow bolt had lodged itself and made a home last time his eyes were open. 

Dorian’s eyes widened; he rested his hand on Bull’s. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

Bull’s mouth was dry as old parchment. He made to pull his hand away. But Dorian would not let go. “Because of you,” he said quietly, “you idiot. You ought to be dead.”

“One good turn deserves another,” Bull rasped. “Stop getting shot.” 

Dorian had no answer for that. They sat there, and Bull asked, “Tell me that’s not Malika.” 

“She’s got a nose for it,” Dorian said. “Secrets, that is. They’re going through the room. You’ve been out half a day.” 

“Shit.” Bull tried to sit up; Dorian wrapped an arm around his shoulders and helped heave. “That long?” 

“Of course you were.” Dorian gave him a look. “Healing,” he blustered on, “should be completely impossible for you. Even the gifted ones can’t do anything like this without practice.” He gave Bull a meaningful look. “ _Years_ of practice.” 

“What do you want me to say?” 

“I don’t know,” he muttered, all frustration. “This would be easier to understand if I could only know how it was done. Or why. Or any piece of it.” 

“Okay,” Bull said. “First part’s you.”

Dorian waved a hand. “I haven’t actually taught you anything. It’s more _berating_ until you do the thing I want--”

His fingers pulled away from Dorian’s belly and caught his wrist instead. A thumb, pressed to where the blood beat in his wrist. Just the tips of his fingers. Held until Dorian’s mouth stopped working, and closed. 

“First part’s you,” he said. “I just thought--he has to get up and walk away. I want to watch him walk away.” He cleared his throat. “There’s all this shit I need to tell you and I don’t know how to start. But, watching you bleed, nothing else mattered. Easy.” He ran his tongue over his teeth. “Like falling. You had to live.” 

The silence raked itself against Bull’s lungs. He waited. Inhaled a breath through his nose. Dorian hesitated, for one terrible moment. Bull thought he would get up, walk away. No reason not to. Nothing keeping him here. 

“I don’t want to go,” Dorian said, very quietly. For a blind moment, Bull thought he meant the ruin, a few paces from the dragon’s egg. “You gave me an out. I won’t take it.” 

“You--”

He wrapped Bull’s hand in both of us, pulled it against him. His thumb skirted over the knuckles. “Right here,” he said, and bent his head. Pressed his lips against Bull’s fingers. “I’m seeing you through.” 

When he breathed out, a soft wisp of white escaped the corner of his lips. “So pick somewhere, Iron Bull,” he said, and Bull’s heart leapt. “And talk.” 

 


End file.
